Current Learning Curve: Python

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Monday, March 14th, 2011 | technical | daniel |

I am currently quickly learning the Python Programming Language for a project that I am currently working on. Its ok though, because its syntactically quite similar to the Ruby Programming Language which I know already (but haven’t done for a while).

In the past I tried to avoid the Python programming language and often stated that it was “just Ruby but without the ‘end’ keyword, and so it relies on whitespace instead”. Aye, it is quite like that. But, I now think that both Ruby and Python each have their own unique pros and cons, and the differences are more than syntactic. We must remember that each application design should carefully review which programming languages and tools would be most useful for the task (along with their feasibility of availability/accessibility).

Much of my learning of Python is just translation of terminology, for instance:

“pickling/unpickling” – essentially object serialisation and deserialisation (i.e. making suitable to store in a file, or send over a network)
“dictionaries” – an unordered key-centred array
“__init__()” – the python constructor method

Its quite nice purposefully learning something new again and applying it for specific tasks. Variety is a spice!

Are there any programming languages that you have have picked up recently, and have you found out anything extraordinary about them? Let me know by commenting.

Cheers,

Daniel

Tags: programming, python

http://vanirsystems.com/blog/2011/03/31/variety-is-a-spice-progression-is-a-necessity/ Variety is a Spice, Progression is a Necessity | Vanir Systems Blog

[...] Variety is a Spice, Progression is a Necessity Thursday, March 31st, 2011 | interesting, technical, vanirsystems | daniel 8In the last couple of weeks I’ve been using a programming language (Python) that I’ve not used extensively in the past to work on a unit of a production website, increasing the simplicity of the unit and hopefully also increasing the efficiency (Occam’s Razor stylie?). I have been learning “as I go along”, and with a little help from a borrowed book[1]. It has been fun, and I’ve found myself liking Python a lot more than I was expecting (as I documented in my previous blog post about My Python Learning Curve). [...]
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“__init__” is also the filename you have to put in a directory (just touch’ing it is enough) to tell python that directory is a package.

And I don’t think any python programmer minds if you use “(de)serialization” instead of “(un)pickling”, since that’s the right term in computing, instead of the python-specific word.

On the other side, “key-centric array” is not the right term, but “dictionary” is.

So as you can see, both languages have introduced new terms which deflect from the standard terminology in computing. Why? We may try to guess…

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Current Learning Curve: Python

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