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[ewx]

Another week with three karate lessons. Monday is too long ago to remember clearly; Wednesday was a bit shaky in parts, Thursday sticks mainly in the memory for getting Heian Nidan much more consistently right than in the past. Learning some of the common patterns in various kata has helped with remembering them at all, but also makes it easier to accidentally slip from one to the other!

I'd originally been intending to go to the pub afterwards on Thursday but was tired to the point of almost dropping off, so stayed at home and after having woken up a little played with Python instead. It's been on my mental to-learn list since some time around 1997, picking up reinforcement in the form of recommendations from various people I know; also, it's starting to gain a lot of traction at work.

My initial impressions are quite favourable; the main thing I'm comparing it against is Perl, and it comes across as simpler, cleaner and of course less thoroughly infested with opaque punctuation than Perl is. Having it automatically cope with integer overflow by automatically switching to bignums was good, too.

Anyway, my plan is to write a DisOrder client module in Python, and possibly to construct a, hopefuly cross-platform, DisOrder GUI around that (although it'll be quite a bit of work before it's comparable to the existing web interface).

Longer term it could be a while before I instinctively write small scripts in Python instead of Perl but it seems at least a possibility that it'll happen.

I'm still debating whether to go to London this evening - it's a while since I last did, but it's also been a very tiring week, not least after having slept poorly last night, so I could really use an evening in. At this rate I'll probably decide after getting home.

Comments

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I was thinking last night actually that the syntax also finds a good balance: my comments above above Perl and punctuation suggest an example for the over-dense end of the spectrum, while at the other end languages like Tcl, Lisp and - especially - FORTH have just too little syntax. (I slightly confused a new starter at nCipher by referring to "tickle", which he'd always pronounced letter by letter.)

Most of my vestigial scepticism about the whitespace rules has faded by now l-)