opinions-python

I just learned the programming language Python. While (my personal) jury's still out until I use it for awhile, so far I like it a lot. Basically, it is a scripting language like Perl, so you don't have to compile or deal with raw memory management. But it does OOP (object-oriented programming) much better than Perl*. And there's one or two other primitives that are cool.

For people who already know how to program, there's a list of tutorials at:

http://www.python.org/topics/learn/prog.html

And for beginners, check out the "Python for non-programmers" page at:

http://www.python.org/topics/learn/non-prog.html

• : On the topic of comparing it to Perl, I was worried that its "Regular Expression" capabilities wouldn't be as good as Perl's, because they are key for text processing programs, but actually the Python "re" library almost exactly mimics Perl-style regular expressions!!!! btw if you haven't used regular expressions, try 'em today!!
  • : My favorite so far is "list comprehensions", a one-line expression that lets you produce a list which is the result of

1. filtering another list according to some criteria 2. and then applying another expression to each list item

for example:

>>> array = [2, 4, 6] >>> [3*x for x in array if x > 3] [12, 18]