Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Point Nine is looking for some talanted people.  They are working in the financial sector, and seeking Python and C++ programmers, as well as Linux system administrators.  They seem to be an interesting company, judging both by their technology stack and hiring techniques.   For example, I’ve spotted their job ad on The Daily WTF.  Cool stuff.  If I wasn’t working where I am working, I would have applied for the job already.

This line caught my attention while I scrolled through MoinMoin wiki features:

written in Python! This means that you can easily read and use the source, even if you don’t know Python yet.

It has love for Python written all over it.

Remember how I mentioned Python only yesterday? Well, I’ve had a really long (and fun) programming session (about 10 hours), and I have a warm feeling of deep familiarity with the language. Yup, I know it. I am surprised though. It usually took me much longer to learn the language.

Of course, I can’t claim that I know it all. Here are the things that I used in the last few hours:

• Lists and dictionaries
• Functions (with parameters and default values) and objects
• Database interaction (MySQL with MySQLdb)
• Forking
• Regular expressions
• Documenting code … Really.

I wrote and re-wrote almost a 1000 lines of code, which made me feel much more comfortable with Python syntax and concepts.

P.S.: I still got it…

Life is full of surprises and irony. Or at least it looks so to me. Especially now.

It’s been more than two years since I planned to learn Python programming language. At first I really wanted to do so, but didn’t have any free time. Then I came across a couple of tasks at work that made me write a few patches here and there, but the complexity just wasn’t there and I didn’t learn anything beyond the simpliest things. Then a lot of time passed by and I forgot those simpliest things too.

Recently I found myself looking at Python code more often than I used to. But I still didn’t have to write any code. Just read and understand.

Then I had to write few more patches. Again, the complexity wasn’t there.

And so on and so forth.

Until today I realized that I have a somewhat complex project to implement and there is practically no choice of programming language. Hooray! I’ll finally have to learn to use Python!

P.S.: I’m glad I was saving up all those Python bookmarks.

Collin Park has written an article in four parts (one, two, three, and four) titled “Why Not Python?”. I’ve read through the first couple of parts and scrolled through the rest.

In all that text that passed in front of my eyes I haven’t found the answer to the question. I guess, it wasn’t actually the question after all then.

Well, in case you read asked yourself “Why Not Python?”, I’ll give one of the possible answers. Because it is too complicated. Python might do OK as the first progarmming language for those of you who want to learn programming concepts. But if you have a problem at hand that needs solving, Perl is the way to go in most of the cases.

Example. Collin Park uses the Sudoku game solver as one of the examples. Fine task. Nice one to learn how to program too. But if you just have a Sudoku game to solve (or a few for that matter), than it would be much faster to do it in Perl. Here is how.

1. Navigate your browser to search.cpan.org.
2. Type in “sudoku”, choose “Modules” and press “Search CPAN”.
3. With this particular example, any module from the search result can be used. With other examples, you want really want to review the module description (one line that says what module does). So, this step is, choose the one module that seems to be appropriate for your problem.
4. Install chosen module, by running cpan command from root shell and typing in install module::name (substitute “module::name” with the name of the module you chose in the previous step).
5. Run perldoc module::name to see module documentation and example of used.
6. Copy the code from SYNOPSIS are of documentation in your favourite editor.
7. Save the file
8. Run the script

Tada! You’re all done.

If it takes you more than 15 minutes, chances are - you are doing something wrong. Of course, your mileage may vary, but 15 minutes is somewhere near the lighthouse.