TTK Ciar's Journal: Developing DVM and Learning Python

My last journal entry is already "archived" :-P so I can't respond to robp there.. Might as well make a new entry while I have a minute.

The only times I've successfully collaborated with others on open-source projects, I developed something with minimum functionality first, then invited others to extend it. I've served as project lead at work, where I could communicate much and easily with co-workers, but OSS projects don't allow for the same luxury.

In that light, I'm inclined to try to develop some minimalist working/useful DVM first, and then share the source code for collaboration.

On the Python front .. I've learned some (still a lot to go), but so far I haven't seen that Python does anything better than Perl. Almost everything it can do, I can do in Perl more easily (even with my verbose, C-like Perl coding style). Also Perl is about twice as fast as Python on my system for arithmetic operations, marginally faster for other things. One nice advantage to Python is that its arrays are much more space-efficient (about the same as C arrays, which means a ~20x improvement over Perl's in some cases). Python seems gratuitously object-oriented, too. Objects can be handy, but do they really have to be the only way to manipulate files, strings, regular expressions, etc? Seems silly.

These are discouraging, but I'm sticking with it because Perl is slowly falling out of favor. People are using Python now to do systemish things, which were once done in Perl. So if I want to improve my chances of getting a job working on the kinds of problems I consider interesting, it's in my best interest to learn Python. Also, several applications I'm interested in modifying (bittornado, ccpublisher, myfile, and others) are written in Python. I'm hoping that with practice it'll grow on me.

As an aside, please check out Nick's spiffy new online game, BrainChef! It's free and a lot of fun. When you create an account, choose zombie ("THEM" when it asks you to pick between "US" or "THEM"), they're more fun to play and it needs more zombie players :-)

-- TTK