{"id":82,"date":"2010-03-06T13:39:36","date_gmt":"2010-03-06T18:39:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sam.tregar.com\/blog\/?p=82"},"modified":"2010-03-06T13:56:03","modified_gmt":"2010-03-06T18:56:03","slug":"on-python-present-and-perl-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sam.tregar.com\/blog\/2010\/03\/06\/on-python-present-and-perl-past\/","title":{"rendered":"On Python Present and Perl Past"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been working in Python almost exclusively for the last 8 or 9 months. It’s been a fun challenge learning a new language, and being able to do it along with the rest of the We Also Walk Dogs<\/a> crew has made it even better. A dip back into Perl has given me a chance to reflect on my progress with Python.<\/p>\n

The past couple weekends I’ve been helping a friend with a small project – a textual analysis problem finding similarities between disparate documents in a large database. I immediately reached for Perl because I’ve done projects like this in Perl before and I knew all the tools I’d need. I indexed phrases from the docs using Digest::MD5<\/a>, storing the index in MySQL with DBD::mysql<\/a>. Then I whipped up a quick web-app with CGI::Application<\/a> and HTML::Template<\/a>, with a bit of help from HTML::FillinForm<\/a>, Blueprint CSS<\/a> and Config::General<\/a>. With the exception of Blueprint (which I find indispensable these days), this is pretty much the toolkit I learned (and helped build) at Vanguard Media working for Jesse Erlbaum<\/a> over ten years ago! It all worked great and the app was up and running in just a day and a half.<\/p>\n

This experience makes it obvious to me that I still have a long way to go with Python. Perl syntax is second nature to me – I almost never make an error and everything works the way I expect it to. I’m not looking up basic Python syntax anymore but I am still making plenty of mistakes. More to the point, the tools I needed to use for this project are all still completely ingrained in my memory, and behave exactly the way I expect them to. Compared to the Python tools I use daily (Django<\/a>, Celery<\/a> and MySQLdb<\/a>, for example), the difference is really impressive. My Python tools often surprise me and I find myself going back to the docs, and failing that the source, frequently.<\/p>\n

It’s also interesting to think about how little has changed in the past 10 years. I can pick up the same tools I used then and construct something that most people would recognize as a modern web app. Mix in just a little Jquery<\/a> and it would probably pass for Web 2.0. On the other hand, I think I can say I’ve gotten better as I’ve aged – this project would have taken me quite a bit longer 10 years ago, if I could have completed it at all. I probably would have gotten stuck on some completely insane plan like loading all the documents into memory at once. I really didn’t know how to properly use a database back then!<\/p>\n

I am looking forward to making my first open-source Python release soon. Who knows, maybe there’s a book about writing Python packages for PyPi<\/a> in my future!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been working in Python almost exclusively for the last 8 or 9 months. It’s been a fun challenge learning a new language, and being able to do it along with the rest of the We Also Walk Dogs crew has made it even better. A dip back into Perl has given me a chance […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sam.tregar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sam.tregar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sam.tregar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sam.tregar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sam.tregar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/sam.tregar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":94,"href":"http:\/\/sam.tregar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions\/94"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sam.tregar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sam.tregar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sam.tregar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}