Over the course of the day, the 2017 Python Language Summit hosted a handful of lightning talks, several of which were worked into the dynamic schedule when an opportunity presented itself. They ranged from the traditional "less than five minutes" format to some that strayed well outside of that time frame—some generated a fair amount of discussion as well. Topics were all over the map: board elections, beta releases, Python as a security vulnerability, Jython, and more.

In his 2017 Python Language Summit session, Jukka Lehtosalo updated attendees on the status of type checking for the language, in general, and for the mypy static type checker. There are new features in the typing module and in mypy, as well as work in progress and planned features for both. For a feature, type hints, that is really only around three years old, there has been a lot of progress made—but, of course, there is still more to come.

There is no viable way to prevent data from being collected about us in the current age of computing. But if institutions insist on knowing our financial status, purchasing habits, health information, political preferences, and so on, they have a responsibility to keep this data—known as personally identifiable information (PII)—from leaking to unauthorized recipients. At the 2017 Strata data conference in London, Steve Touw presented a session on privacy-enhancing technologies. In a fast-paced 40 minutes he covered the EU regulations about privacy, the most popular technical measures used to protect PII, and some pointed opinions about what works and what should be thrown into the dustbin.

Mark Shannon is concerned that the Python core developers may be replaying a mistake: treating two distinct things as being the same. Treating byte strings and Unicode text-strings interchangeably is part of what led to Python 3, so he would rather not see that happen again with types and classes. The Python typing module, which is meant to support type hints, currently implements types as classes. That leads to several kinds of problems, as Shannon described in his session at the 2017 Python Language Summit.