A Beginner's Doubt

[rusi]

On Jun 19, 9:53 pm, Joshua Landau <joshua.landau... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Please be aware, Augusto, that Rick is known to be a bit... OTT. Don't
> take him too seriously (but he's not an idiot either).
>
> On 19 June 2013 14:58,  <augusto... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hello!
> > This is my first post in this group and the reason why I came across here is that, despite my complete lack of knowledge in the programming area, I received an order from my teacher to develop a visually interactive program, until 20th July, so we can participate in a kind of contest.
>
> > My goal is to learn and program it by myself, as good as the time allows me. That said, what I seek here is advice from people who definitively have more experience than me on topics like: is it possible to develop this kind of program in such a short amount of time?
>
> Possible? Yes.
> It'll be well'ard to get much done with too limited a knowledge base,
> but it should be possible even then.
>
> > What kinds of aspects of Python should I focus on learning? What tutorials and websites are out there that can help me? What kind of already done packages are out there that I can freely use, so I do not need to create all the aspects of the program froms scratch?
>
> Neil Cerutti suggested Tkinter. Choosing a good simple GUI toolkit is
> a good idea over Pygame for something like this.
> I've used Pygame and I guarantee you it's not the hammer you want.
>
> (I don't know much about GUI's to be honest, though.)
>
>
>
> > It would be wise to give an abstract of the program. I made an information flux kind of graphic, but I do not know how to post it in here, so I'll use only words:
> <STUFF>
> > Thats basically the whole program. I've been studying Python for a week and half now, through: How to think like a Computer Scientist and Invent with Python and Pygame. I'm still at the very beggining, though, and I can't make much more than make some images appear on a Pygame screen in a menu-like style, with a patterned gap between them. No mouse interactions up to now.
>
> In regards to this, I really would recommend just taking Rick's
> suggestion: Tkinter; canvas; menu; etc.
>
> Now, as I'm probably the most new programmer here I'll point out that
> I don't agree with Chris when he says that:
>
> > One way or
> > another, you will probably spend the next week writing code you throw
> > away; if you try to tackle the primary project immediately, you'll
> > have to rewrite parts of it as you learn. It's easier to throw away a
> > toy "Hello world" program than hunks of what you thought would be your
> > final code.
>
> As a new programmer, you will throw away code whether or not you
> practice beforehand. Beware of that. If anything, it's the best thing
> you can do*.

Speaking with the prejudice of teaching programming for 25 years :-)
heres my take on this difference-of-opinion:

Imagine your program as a final finished product of say 2000 lines of
python.
So you have to log-up that 2000 lines one by one.  Do you prefer to
use an adder or a multiplier?
If you only do 'add-1' youve to take two thousand steps, if you allow
mul-2 and mul-5 you can reach in 7.
Chris solution -- get good before you start your actual work --
amounts to the second, Joshua's -- just start! -- to the first.

Clearly the second is preferable right?? WRONG! You could get stuck in
a multiply-by-zero loop!
So you need the right combo of plodding along (Joshua) and self-
improvement (Chris).