Dorin's technical playground: February 2010

Let's start with what I really don't like: Invisible syntax sucks. Big time.

When your application complains about some spaces in your indentation, you know that you've done something wrong. So you load the source back in the editor, but you don't get it. It looks perfect. But it's not. This is because tabs are different from spaces, and spaces and tabs are a very very very different thing. So Python says.

There is nothing cool about this particular feature, except the enforcing of 'good looking code', and I find it very very confusing.

On the plus side, throwing together pieces of code that would simply be run is quite cool, not to mention the ease with which you get to do certain operations when compared with C/C++. On the other hand, the ease of use is actually reflected in the run times and probably beginner users like me will always make sluggish applications.

Another thing that I don't like so much is the fact that you don't have error checking on the run trails that you don't get to touch. So for example if you write a function and you have somewhere a misspelling, the error might pop up to you only in the rare case you might hit that line/trail. This is where a compilation stage becomes really really helpful, in my opinion, because quite some time is wasted on getting your code tested for the basic requirements (like not mistaking setGeometry for setgeometry).

The second part of my explorations with PyQt is the Qt4 framework(s), quite different conceptually from what I used to know from the Qt3 that I used so much some time ago. Better? Arguable, but my instincts were trained to use the Qt3 way of thinking, so I am not drawing any conclusions.

In the mean time I am really happy to say that it's pretty fun to use so far. If performance is not necessarily your goal, Python might be the language of choice.

Dorin's technical playground

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Python: my first 2 days

Monday, February 1, 2010

Useful X11 programming links