why I love python

Lately, discussions at the NFJS conference and recent conversations with friends have made me introspective about why I like Python.

I first started using Python about 9 years ago. Previously, I'd used mostly C, C++, Perl, Pascal, and a very little bit of Visual Basic.

Pascal was what I'd learned in High School. VB, C, and C++ were what I'd used during college (I guess there was a teeeeny bit of Lisp thrown in there too). My first couple years as a software engineer, C++ was the hammer with which I'd pounded all programming nails.

Eventually I learned Perl. It was OK. But, like most people, I'd write Perl scripts and not be able to read them the next month.

After a recomendation I'd read online, I tried the Python tutorial. The conciseness was a revelation. The way it got out of my way and let me worry about the problem and not the compile/run/debug loop. Having dictionaries and lists as a first-class language features blew me away. I don't know why similar features in Perl never struck me in the same way.

Learning Python not only completely reinvigorated my interest in programming, but it also and completely changed the way I program. Maybe I still love Python because of the sentimental attachment to it from that first revelatory period of experimentation.

no fluff just stuff SLC 2009

It was pretty good. Only went to one session that was a dud. Decided to try to go to a number of different speakers in an attempt to not get burnt out. But, I should have just stuck with all of Venkat Subramanian's sessions the first day's afternoon. He's an awesome speaker.

I enjoyed seeing other dynamic languages -- groovy, scala, clojure. Definitely seems like mixing in Groovy to any java project would be pretty easy. Loved that it removed a lot of Java's verbosity, but kept the barrier of entry low. Groovy also seemed to be much more readable than clojure or scala.

Scala seemed very interesting -- liked the type inference, and concurrency support. But, I hate hate hate the underscore. And that g-damn colon that changed the operator/operand. Maybe if I used it every day, it'd seem more readable.

I guess if people can hate Python's significant whitespace (which I love), I can have an irrational hatred of Scala's underscores/colons.

further adventures in horrible code -- effin assert

Lots of assert() checks spread throughout our code, testing perfectly valid error conditions. Used sparingly, testing things that absolutely could not happen... ok. But checking for NULL values passed as parameters to various type comparison functions? Eeesh.

It's caused problems up a couple times before... but last Friday's was extra awesome. I'd been working for 3 days with a customer, trying to resolve the cause of a crash of our application at their site. Finally get them to install WinDbg and run our debug build so we can get some crash dumps.

Bang. Assertion failure. Nowhere near the crash we see when running a release build.

Dig into the crash dump. Dirty data in their database that the release-compiled version of our application just ignores because the assert() check is turned into a no-op by the preprocessor for release builds.

I can't tell them it's their data that needs to be fixed. This application and its periodic releases has been running just fine on their system for 5+ years.

But, I also can't run the debug version of the latest release to diagnose their current problem. It's stopping during initialization due to the asserts.

Argh.