Network Zero

Source

There’s a small trend in the UK-based education-related Python development world: creating easy-to-use packages and using the suffix “zero” to indicate that they involve “zero” boilerplate or “zero” learning curve… or something. Daniel Pope started it with his PyGame Zero package; Ben Nuttall carried on with GPIO Zero; and I’ve followed up with Network Zero. FWIW I’m fairly sure the Raspberry Pi Zero was named independently but it fits nicely into the extended Zero family. Nicholas Tollervey was even excited enough to create a Github organisation to collate ideas around the “Zero” family. His own Mu editor [*] although lacking the naming convention is, in spirit, an Editor Zero.

We’ve never really talked it out, but I think the common theme is to produce packages especially suitable for classroom & club use, where:

  • The *zero package sits on top of an established package (PyGame, GPIO, 0MQ) which more advanced students can drop into once they’ve reached the bounds of the simplified *zero approach.
  • The emphasis is on up-and-running use in a classroom or club rather than clever coding techniques. There’s a slight preference for procedural rather than object-based API (although everything in Python is an object but still…)
  • Helpful messages: where it’s feasible, error messages should be made relevant to the immediate *zero package rather than reflecting an error several levels deep. This goes a little against a common Python philosophy of letting exceptions bubble to the top unaltered but is more suitable for less experienced coders

My own Network Zero is definitely a work in progress, but I’m burning through all my commuting hours (and a few more besides) to get to a stable API with useful examples, helpful docs and tests which pass on all current Python versions across all three major platforms. Tom Viner has been incredibly helpful in setting up tox and CI via Travis & Appveyor.

If you feel like contributing, the activity is happening over on Github and the built documentation is on readthedocs. I welcome comments and suggestions, always bearing in mind the Design Guidelines.

Any teachers I know are welcome to comment of course, but I’ll be reaching out to them specifically a little later when the codebase has stabilised and some examples and cookbook recipes are up and documented.

Feel free to raise issues on Github as appropriate. If you have more general questions, ping me on Twitter.

[*] I think Nicholas should have embraced the Unicode and named it μ with the next version called ν (with absolutely no apologies for the cross-language pun)