first experiences with Python

[Rob Andrews]

Your story reminds me a lot of my own. I even recall thinking the 
documentation could be a little better when I first started, although I 
did wind up changing my mind after I thought about it some more. 
Fortunately, there are also plenty of Python resources out there, such as 
the Python Tutor email list, comp.lang.python (which is newbie-friendly 
in the extreme by usenet standards), three not-insignificant source code 
collections that I can think of off the top of my head, and there are an 
amazing number of tutorials on the web written by people who just love 
the language.

Python's also a great way to get started in programming in a meaningful 
way. I'm in a summer-long intensive introduction to C++ (covering 9 
months of computer science in about 8 weeks), and we're about half-way 
through. Thanks to Python helping me to understand the basics of what's 
happening during the software development process, I've been holding down 
a perfect score so far. And I sometimes show people in the class how to 
do something in Python that we just did in C++, which seems to impress 
them more than a little.

Python's fun, and it gets the job done! It's a language so good that I 
feel I can be a Python zealot without having to insult other languages to 
get my point across.

Rob
http://uselesspython.com

mis6 at pitt.edu (Michele Simionato) wrote in
news:2259b0e2.0207060253.1723a696 at posting.google.com: 

> I became aware of the existence of Python a couple of months ago. 
> The reason was an exceptional wave of heat in Pittsburgh, my problem 
> the conversion from Fahrenheits to Celsius (I recently moved from
> Europe to the States and I hate Fahrenheits !).

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