Adventures in Python

Although over the last few years I've dabbled in Python a little, I've never really sat down and made an actual program with it. I made a little web app for Google's app engine some time ago, however I don't really consider it a lot of coding and hardly enough experience to say that I really know the language.

I have the same problem that most Ruby people seem to have: we really see no reason to learn Python. There is not really any objective benefit that it gives. Both Ruby and Python offer faster development times compared to languages like C++ or Java (although it would be interesting to see which of the two languages would be faster, I don't really know). They're both interpreted (and therefore, slow and memory-intensive). They both have good-sized followings and plenty of free software available for them. So I don't really know any good reason to switch between the two - I know many Python people say the same about Ruby.

For the record, the thing I'm making now is a little game. You can check it out here if you like, it is a little Diablo-style game where you go around stabbing monsters. Hopefully it will evolve into something cooler at some point, but for now it is pretty limited.

Anyway I'll give my first impressions of the language, from the perspective of someone who has lots of experience with other Perl-derived languages (namely Ruby and PHP). Keep in mind that this is all subjective and you are more than welcome to disagree - although I think most of the people who read this blog are Ruby people anyway so I doubt too many feelings will be hurt by this one.

Things I like so far:

• Whitespace - I love it. At first I felt as though my code were naked without end keywords or closing brackets, however after a while it becomes enjoyable. I find it makes the code much more clean, and you don't have to worry about whether you have too many or too few ends, just make the indentation work (which I would have done anyway). I do tend to forget to put the colon at the end, but that's probably just because I'm still new to the game.
• Modularity - At it was a little annoying to have to import the modules in every single file that use it or to have to specify "from ... import ...", but in the long run it is a better way to go in that it helps break down coupling between files. I'm thinking I should take this back to Ruby and design things in this way.
• List Comprehensions - they're nice and precise and do things that in Ruby you'd have to use zips, maps and selects for (unless of course my Ruby-fu is not amazing and there are similar things in Ruby that I don't know about, which is likely).

Now for the things I don't like:

• Object-Orientation - it feels a little...clunky. I have to put self everywhere. While it isn't a real complaint, it is a bit annoying and does clutter things up a fair bit. I find Ruby's sigil notation to be cleaner. Also one of the things from PHP that I really hated was having to declare something as global, it is here too. Don't like it.
  static vs. class methods? Not sure why. It also seems like I have to jump through hoops to create these things.
• Naming conventions: __ clutters up the screen, I feel like I'm writing C again: typedef struct _name { ...
  I find def+() or operator+() to be much more readable. But then again, it's what I'm used to.
  Finally, certain things like lists not having a length() method and instead you call the global method len() seems to be a little inconsistent to me. Same goes for various things like map, filter, etc.
• It's very imperative - This may not be a bad thing. Some people like this kind of programming, they say it's old school. Feels like real programming again instead of plugging libraries/gems into one another and suddenly having an application.
  For me, I've gotten used to using functional-esque programming with Ruby and to a lesser extent Javascript with jQuery, so coming to Python seems like I'm more limited in how I can express what I want to write. But whatever.

So yeah, my reasons for it aren't really substantial, nor are the reasons against it. What do other people think?

One thing I've really learned here is that I haven't really done much with Ruby besides web apps, which in terms of complexity really aren't that deep - I don't know if "deep" is the right word here, but it seems like that when you write a web app there are fewer levels of moving parts than in an app like a game. I wonder what it would be like if I rewrote this app in Ruby, if it would have taken as long to make and if it would be more maintainable or not - probably yes since I actually know Ruby a lot better, but maybe not.