Python is fun (useless social thread) ;-)

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John Salerno wrote:
> Did you have to learn it for a job?

No, although it became useful once I learnt it.

> Or did you just like what you saw and decided to learn it for fun?

I saw Bruce Eckel mention it in "Thinking in Java, 2nd ed." as
"something that was slowly becoming his favorite programming language".
How would *you* react to that? :)

> Also, how did you go about learning it? (i.e., like I described above, I
> started with the main stuff then moved on to the different available
> frameworks)

I started with the tutorial, although I didn't read it end-to-end. Then
I toyed a little with DB API (MySQLdb). It came useful some two weeks
after installing Python, when I was doing some DB refactoring in the
(Java) app I was working on at the time. Compared to JDBC, Python DB
API is very lightweight, which also taught me how not to overdesign.

Later I learnt Tkinter when I wrote a tool for some admin tasks on that
DB. I was to lazy to do it in Java.

> Was there any necessity in the specifics you learned, or did you just
> dabble in something (e.g. wxPython) for fun?

See above.

> Are there still some things you feel you need to learn or improve?

Metaclasses and other magic, if I ever need that stuff. Otherwise,
design and algorithms - these are not Python-specific, but Python can
be a useful learning tool here.

> Additional comments/complains here:   :)

Every XML API for Python that I tried sucks in one way or another. Try
manipulating a document with multiple namespaces, you'll know. Not that
I ever saw any XML API in any language that would do everything I
expected from it correctly. Ergo, XML sucks. :)

Cheers,

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