2 February 2003

I’ve started coding in Python recently. It has a powerful set of class libraries which are easy to work with and so it’s handy for building quick, extensible prototypes. The Gtk/GNOME2 bindings are good, but not complete; actually the Mono bindings look more complete in some areas that are important to me, like GtkHTML.

But it’s so much nicer than writing with objects-in-C. The thought:typing ratio is a lot higher in a real object system with modern idioms. One difference, though, is that C is so messy that you force yourself to structure it heavily, and now I find myself being slightly sloppier in Python, because rigor just doesn’t feel as critical.

People bitch a lot about the semantic significance of whitespace in Python, and they’re right. Style and semantics should be decoupled. But if you can look beyond that, it’s a pretty good framework for light application development.

Desktop application integration would be so much easier if all the common tools were written in something like Python instead of C. Adding remote-control interfaces to things like your IM client, your file manager, etc. would be a breeze. Performance sensitive codepaths could be written in C if necessary.

In another plug, I’ve been enjoying the wallpapers from digital blasphemy. Two of my favorites are below:

 

It’s nearly 4am now, but considering I woke up at 7:30pm today, I may not be sleeping for a while. I’m not even sure what timezone waking up that late puts me in. Asia/Phnom_Penh, I think.

Speaking of which, my friend Jimmy K has been prancing around southeast Asia for the last couple months, and has been updating his web page as he goes.