[Tutor] Did you learn to program with Python???

[Gonçalo Rodrigues]

From: "Magnus Lycka" <magnus@thinkware.se>

>Are there any people on this mailing list for whom Python
>was the first programming language, or perhaps even better,
>not the first they tried, but the first that worked? :)
>(Are there any counter examples?)

I am not a professional programmer and in what I do (mathematics) I hardly
program at all - unless you call LaTeX programming.

Still, I was always fascinated with programming and programming languages. I
started learning with BASIC in a ZX Spectrum 48K (Ah, those were the
days...) at a tender age, and from then on I "learned" C, Pascal,
Mathematica, Java. Now, I wrote learned between "" because even though I
knew the principles and the rules of the game I never actually played it,
that is, I never have actually done anything useful (if you leave out the
assignments when I was an undergraduate - in Pascal or Mathematica). This is
certainly due to my temperament (lack of self-discipline, patience, ...)
but, with what I know today, this is also due to the hurdles that the use of
those languages posed. There was always a lot of detail that you had to pay
attention to, that sidetracked you from the main issue, just to get simple
things working. The result was almost inevitably frustration - I would soak,
throw the toy away and turn my attention somewhere else.

And then came Python. I first heard about Python in a forum about MUDs. I
like MUDs a lot, but one of the things I like most is that you can program
little scripts to automate things away and generally just make your mudding
life easier - hell, you can even program entire bots to do the mudding for
you! Anyway, MUD clients usually come with their own special-purpose
language (usually a TinTin clone) which I was finding progressively
difficult to use. The problems I wanted to solve were progressively more
difficult, and the scripting language was just not powerful enough to tackle
them. So I thought of learning yet another language, and in some
distant-chimaerical future use it in mudding.

And what I can say is that Python was/is the first language that worked,
that is, with which I did something useful and not totally trivial. Besides
numberless little utilities to manage my windoze system, some recipes in
ActiveState's cookbook, I have done a special-purpose accounting program for
my own personal use connecting to Excel via COM and with a wxPython Gui on
top, and a small semi-professional app connecting to a Jet database, also
via COM, to do data laundering. So much so, that I have embarked on a more
serious personal project. And, let me stress this again, all this was done
in the little spare time I can afford - and no, I am not a workaholic or
even a fast worker by any standards, although I do suffer from insomnias.

The reason? Well, I think the main reason is that Python, and I am quoting
someone else whose name I can't remember, just gets out of your way. The
amount of cruft is kept to a minimum so that the bare essentials can come
out - having fun programming! Uniformity, regularity and elegance are the
other qualities that I would name.

>How did you learn Python?

>What resource was most helpful?

I basically grabbed everything available on the Net and, usually in insomnia
nights, studied it.

>Some book?

I have four Python books on my shelf, all very good. But it was the second
one I bought, M. Lutz's Programming Python, from where I learned the most.
It was very important to me, because it helped me to understand some
higher-level design issues.

>Some tutorial on the web?

>Some mailing list or IRC channel etc?

comp.lang.py has also been invaluable in this respect. The average quality
of the posts, the speed and knowledge and <insert here your favourite
characteristic>
with which my questions were answered has been a very strong reason for
keeping my interest in programming alive.

With my best regards (and with my appologies for the excessive verbosity),
Gonçalo Rodrigues