python for everyday tasks

[Dan Stromberg]

Teach that Python emphasizes readability.  Perhaps talk about bugs /
lines_of_code being roughly a constant.  Then talk about the fact that
Python generally takes fewer lines of code to express the same thing.  This
implies fewer bugs for many projects.

Teach the fundamental types, with differences from other languages: int,
float (C double), decimal, maybe fractions.  Booleans.  lists, arrays,
dictionaries, sets, tuples, frozensets.

Teach that variables don't have a type, but values do.  Teach a = b.  Teach
a, b = b, a.  Teach that python is duck typed (dynamically typed), and
isn't manifestly or statically typed.  Provide definitions.  Discuss what
it means to be "strongly typed", which doesn't mean what a lot of people
think it does: Python is strongly typed, the main exception being that you
can use almost anything in a boolean context.

Teach the control flow, with differences from other languages: while,
for/else, if/elif/else. break/continue, list comprehensions, and maybe
generator expressions.  Include things like enumerate() and iterators and
with statements.  Probably do yield too - it's not crucial to being
productive in python, but it's plenty useful; probably show how it can
generate powers of 2 forever or something.

Teach that python has builtins, not keywords - IOW, you can redefine list
or int, but you probably shouldn't.  pylint helps with this.

Teach classes with __init__.   Teach __str__, __repr__, and teach __cmp__
or __lt__ (depending on your python version), and perhaps some other magic
methods like (a subset of) emulating a container, or emulating a number.
Maybe talk about Python's stellar built in Timsort that was later adopted
by Java.

Teach pylint, including how to turn off unimportant warnings; I usually do
this in my code, but you can also use a pylintrc.  A short time talking
about pylint (or pychecker or pyflakes, and perhaps pep8 too) should help
them teach themselves quite a bit - think of these as expert systems about
how to write better python.  Personally, I use a pyflakes plugin in vim,
but my default "make" rule invokes pylint for "the" entire project, as well
as my automated tests one at a time.  Sometimes my default "make" rule does
pep8 too, but not always; pylint covers a lot of what pep8 does anyway.

Touch briefly on a cross-platform debugger like winpdb (it's cross-platform
despite the name) or pudb.  Some people will prefer to just do print
functions/statements (again depending on python version), but others will
really value the debugger, and some people will use some of both.

Stress the importance of automated tests relative to other languages.  IMO,
even with pylint, having plenty of good automated tests is crucial in a
large python project, especially if it's multi-programmer.

If you have time, provide some guidance about whether to use Python 2.x or
3.x.  IMO, projects that have their dependencies satisfied in 3.x (or have
no dependencies!), should use 3.x today.  Otherwise, use 2.x with "from
__future__" imports where practical.

Talk about decorators.

If you have time, maybe talk about available interpreters: CPython 2.x,
CPython 3.x, Jython (python in java that can call java classes), Pypy
(python in python with a JIT), IronPython (IronPython lacks a standard
library for the most part, but lets you talk to .net classes).  Maybe also
talk about Python in the browser:
http://stromberg.dnsalias.org/~strombrg/pybrowser/python-browser.html .
There was a time when Jython could be used for in-browser-python by
generating .class files, but I don't think it can anymore, and java browser
plugins seem to be disappearing anyway; the world seems to be heading
toward javascript for in-browser, RIA.

Feel free to raid
http://stromberg.dnsalias.org/~dstromberg/Intro-to-Python/for slides.

HTH



On Fri, Nov 22, 2013 at 3:59 PM, <koch.mate at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I'm about held a short course with the title indicated in the subjects.
> The students are very experienced programmers of our company, with deep
> knoledge on C, C++, C#, Perl and similar languages, but very limited, or
> absolutely no knowledge on python.
>
> what would you teach to such a group in 5x1.5 hours? I'm looking for the
> most interesting, unique topics, emphesizing python's strong points.
>
> I have already a couple ideas:
>  - a general intro about tuples, lists, dicts, sets, and working with these
>  - functional programming tools, functools, itertools, lambda, map, filter
>  - wsgi, pickle
>
> I'd appreciate a lot if you could add some ideas
>
> thanks,
> Mate
> --
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>
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