For a while now I’ve felt like learning a new programming language, something different which doesn’t have the very familiar C-style syntax.
In the last year or so, there has been a lot of press around the ‘new’ programming language Python. Python is an interpreted dynamic object oriented language, in fact the language itself is implemented using objects such that a primitive like an integer is in fact an object. Python provides the ability to write command line, network aware, GUI and web based applications.
I’ve decided to give Python a serious look and over the coming weeks and months, I’ll be posting various code snippets and thoughts about it here for you to read and evaluate for yourself. Hopefully we’ll all learn something useful from it, happy hacking.
Cool. I’m learning Python as well.
I do think Ruby does a better job of the “everything is an object” metaphor, but Python is pretty cool too.
If you really want a change, try learning Lisp. I’ve been doing that recently (see my blog for more) and it’s been a really eye-opening experience.
I’ll say Ruby’s object model is probably a tad better than Python’s. For Python, I think it is probably more correct to say that “everything is a hashtable/dictionary”. Well, almost everything :)
However I’ve coding Python for more than 5 years now and I don’t regret the decision, especially moving from Perl/PHP. I found its syntax much cleaner and unambiguious than even Ruby, and is quite easy to pick up. Personally prefer its “One way” philosophy. It also saves us heaps of money at work, because it is fast for prototyping and implementation, and new developers with no prior experience can pick it up in a few days. Even our sales/account managers are learning a subset of Python to write macros we provided in our software.
Lisp has to be the one language that I learnt (well enough to pass) at uni that I found somewhat enjoyable. We had to solve the 8 queens problem – place 8 queens on a chessboard in such a way that no queen can be taken by any other. All the recent noise about Lisp has me thinking of it again and contemplating taking another look at it.
Scott,
That’s pretty awesome really. I recall a friend of mine saying that he/they implemented a simple subset of VB in a VB.net application for other people in the company. They now use that to create/query data or something I believe, excellent idea I think. What are you folks using your Python subset for?
Al.