So, I sometimes like to make itty bitty stuff in python. I am not a master of it but know its syntax and stuff. I made this so we can talk about python.
I've played around with it here and there but I don't know much about it. It isn't really a necessary language, is it? I mean, it's probably going to be outdated sometime in the near future. Hell, HTML5 was released a few months ago and it's already been upgraded so much its nowhere near what it was when it came out.
What's it even used for? We used it in class for some weird program to make servers run faster, although I doubt it's used for server maintenance.
I've seen it while looting my school's programs once or twice but never had the motive for it. I'm sure I could get into it, but I need to know two things.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how hard is it to learn?
And Also on a Scale of 1 to 10, how powerful is it?
I'd give it a rating of 3 in difficulty. I remember it was pretty easy, but there were a few things that could trip you up. I remember writing a page or two of code and have it completely fail because I forgot a character here and there. If I remember correctly, it was as easy to memorize as HTML5.
And Also on a Scale of 1 to 10, how powerful is it?
Python works just like any other server side language. It runs as a CGI process on the server and can access database and output results just like CF, PHP, JSP, and ASP. I would suggest you go to http://python.org and read up on some of its capabilities. From devshed.com
Looks pretty powerful to me. PHP and ASP aren't too bad, so I'd give it a 7 rating or so.
Learning python right now actually! We learn C next semester, hopefully by spring if anyone needs help with Python I'll be a natural ;D For those of you who are used to other languages and are too lazy to look up Python here's an example for you for a scrolling starfield with random color variables!
# Starfield import pygame import random import time
I've been using Python for multiple years now, I love the language, but it does have some issues. Like that it is about 100-times-slower than C in lower-level benchmarks. Python also has no way of commenting out multiple lines of code, other than by using the hack of designating such code an extended string with the triple single quote operator, of course. "self" (the Python equivalent of C++ and Java's "this" is never implicit in Python: You always have to name it. There's more issues with Python, though I'm not going to have you read through all of it's little issues. Python has those issues in it, but weighing out the disadvantages with its advantages, Python is a great language to use and is very recommended.
Just finished my first python game It's super simple (it was just a project for my class) created a ship with a shield and asteroids coming at it that you must destroy. It was actually really fun to code!! on top of that I made my own images and sounds so it was that much better from my own personal point of view!
Yeah I started using python again to make a bot to play a flash game named Jacksmith. It is pretty good with the libraries to control the mouse/keyboard and is fairly easy to set up but when you start taking pictures and comparing it to the screen is slows down drastically. I might have to optimize my code but I think c++ would be faster albeit much more of a pain to work with.
The other thing to remember is that python is in an interpreted language. On the upside this means that there are no compiling times (yay!) and your program is cross-platform (as long as they have the interpreter on their system, which you can bundle with the install if need be). The downside is that it tends to be slightly less efficient, so in memory intensive scenarios like raytracing, you may be better off with something in the C family.
