Yay, more Python time. How can I have no children yet still have no time to work on hobby projects? At any rate, I continued in my quest to get a wireframe version of DM1 loading this morning. I’m really liking the basic Python way of working. Not having to care about variable types is really refreshing.
Flexibility
It’s really nice to work with something this fluid and dynamic. For example, variable length argument lists are an absolute breeze in Python. Check this out:
def myFunction( *args ):
print len( args )
for arg in args:
print arg
That’s it. I can call myFunction with any number of arguments and it will “just work”. I LOVE that. Setting that up in C++ is such a pain the ass by comparison.
Memory Management
Something else I’m really digging so far is the memory management and I think it’s time that I came clean on this issue. I can now freely admit that I can’t be bothered to work in a language that doesn’t have garbage collection. I just don’t have the time or the patience. I want to write code that does productive things, not code that goes through gyrations trying to clean up after itself. It’s 2009, you need to provide garbage collection or I’m not using your language.
Learning By Doing
I learn best when I’m doing rather than reading. I started out reading a couple of books on Python and while that helped me establish a baseline of knowledge I find that I really learn best when I’m trying to write something for real. Just this morning I’ve picked up how to do static member functions, variable length argument lists, and gotten a much better understanding of how a Python program is structured.
Back to the doing and learning…