Transcrypt with Jacques de Hooge

00:00:00
/
00:42:10

March 26th, 2016

42 mins 10 secs

Your Hosts

About this Episode

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our community, and sign up for our mailing list.

Summary

Any programmer who has dealt with a website for any length of time knows that writing JavaScript isn’t always the most enjoyable. Wouldn’t you rather write that code in Python and just have it work on your website? In this episode we learn about Transcrypt with its creator Jacques de Hooge. Transcrypt is a Python to JavaScript transpiler that embraces the JavaScript ecosystem while letting you use the familiar syntax of Python for writing your logic, rather than trying to shoehorn a Python runtime into your browser.

Brief Introduction

  • Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
  • Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS
  • Follow us on Twitter or Google+
  • Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+
  • Join our community! Visit discourse.pythonpodcast.com for your opportunity to find out about upcoming guests, suggest questions, and propose show ideas.
  • I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at pythonpodcast.com
  • Linode is sponsoring us this week. Check them out at linode.com/podcastinit and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for your next project
  • I would also like to thank Hired, a job marketplace for developers and designers, for sponsoring this episode of Podcast.__init__. Use the link hired.com/podcastinit to double your signing bonus.
  • ODSC East in Boston is happening on May 21st – 22nd. Use the discount code EP for 20% off when you register
  • Your host today is Tobias Macey
  • Today I am interviewing Jacques de Hooge about his work on the Transcrypt Project

Interview with Jacques de Hooge

  • Introductions
  • How did you get introduced to Python? – Tobias
  • What is Transcrypt and what inspired you to create it? – Tobias
  • As you mention in the documentation, there are a number of projects that attempt to shoehorn Python into the browser. What makes Transcrypt different? – Tobias
  • I like that you decided to embrace the web environment by calling into JavaScript libraries. What are some of the challenges that you encountered while creating that functionality? – Tobias
  • How is the transpilation performed and what are some of the methods that you used to get the build size as small as it is? – Tobias
  • Given the nature of JavaScripts prototypical inheritance and differences in class semantics, I imagine that adding support for multiple inheritance and reflecting the structure of Python classes must have been challenging. Can you describe that process and how you arrived at your current solution? – Tobias
  • Which aspects of the language were most difficult to translate to JavaScript? – Tobias
  • Is Transcrypt complete and stable enough to be used in production? – Tobias

Keep in Touch

Picks

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA