Python

I just spent most of today learning python at work. I knew almost nothing and in about a day I can say I mostly understand python and how to use it. My first impressions were, this is interesting, but by the end of the day it really just bothers me. The idea of having everything in classes as public scares me, and having nothing constant is even more scary. Personally, I hate the idea of variables not being connected to a specific type, but that is pretty common in scripting languages *shudder*.

I do have to say I do enjoy the len() built-in function as well as you can use isinstance() w/ exceptions to store of stimulate some sort of type-checking. The python library is pretty much like most other languages and the fact that string is pretty much a built-in type makes things very convenient. The other nice feature of python is how simple they make reading files. It honestly feels just effortless to do some of the things in python, I mean you can even potentially use python as your back-end instead of say... php or a few others. I personally like php more than python for a number of reasons, okay maybe not for the $. Now, don't get me wrong, python is wonderful, except it just feels very different than what I am used to which means debugging results in a number of small little errors here and there.

White space being important is a nice thing, but I do prefer my braces just to keep it clear where things end and begin. With python you have to look for the last statement and then the first one that is indented less. It feels like too much work looking around for things, instead of just having a reassuring brace there to be like "hey I'm done now". I do admit the whole concept of "definition must occur first before usage" is a little bit annoying, but I pretty much think of it along the lines of... programming without function prototypes. Then I just feel like I want to cuddle up with Java or C# and keep things simple.

In other news, I'm working on a new game... I'm sure by tomorrow there will be some sort of game on display.