Month: March 2006

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.