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Tuesday, September 4, 2012

A year into languages

I am not much active here... huh. Well, it has been a productive period :) So, who would have a time to write texts when there is so much code to write :)

This year has been amazing for me so far. I have discovered so many new things and so many old things in a new way.

One fine day in spring I started discussing some project with a friend of mine. He has said - why not doing that in Python? As for coincidence a day or two before that suggestion I have pulled Python book from my library and started light reading - for no reason at all. Book was collecting dust for nearly 5 years when I was last time using it.

So things started rolling. Reading a bit about language, baby steps, try this, try that. After a while I have said lets now jump to web... I started with Django, got awed how that works, but was too away from what I needed.

Then I discovered webpy and all sorts of libraries for web notably markdown made a huge impression. Turbo gears too.

Then, I needed to switch to some databasing, actually adopting some old tables given in excell and making that data into database, so I lightly have taken sqlite on the road (amazing small database system)..

Quickly everything that I was doing in PERL once upon a time now have found a Pythonian approach. Python was flexible animal where ever I tried to go. In every domain I have found a bunch of libraries that worked extremely fine.

It was not a straight road but enjoyable one. I love when I make some results, i.e. when I do not run to a dead end that no one has experienced and no help can be found, and even after a lot of experiments you endup with no result - that is frustrating. Luckily that did not happen with Python at all. On contrary, Python proved to be THE TOOL for many little programming tasks. If you havent paid attention to it as yet, get to know it, it is worth spending time.

Not to stop at just one multifacet snake I also recently stepped on Go or better Go Language or how they call it short golang (to be easier to search).

Go was another refreshment and I am amazed that instead of propheting the scripts and object oriented approach Go actually takes a lot from Python in not tormenting a programmer. Syntax is shorter, target is well formed and what is most important it is open source!

In my view many commercial packages in software have huge disadvantage: company may go bust or thing may not prove profitable. I have seen that with microsoft many times but they are not only one to abandon something.

Open source is full of not often walked paths, but, somehow, if you wait long enough, paths congregate to some packages that live and live and after some time become so stable that are even better than many commercial software packages. I hope Go will follow this path.

There is a lot on the net that advocates or gives head start for Go. At this time I am not going to publish many links only start points, each link here is a tip of an iceberg...

If you are interested in Python start here http://www.python.org/
For Go start here http://golang.org/

Will try to come back here and write down some experiences with both of them, but a bit later, currently there is so many things I have to do.