Last week, I wrote about my discontent with PHP and why I chose to give Python a shot at becoming my new tool of choice. Since then, Python and I have spent a lot of time together getting acquainted. I’m finally becoming accustomed to the lack of semicolons and curly braces and have accepted Python’s whitespace neurosis. It hasn’t completely dethroned PHP yet because I am still evaluating which web framework I want to invest the time into learning first (Django, TurboGears, Pylons) and then picking my templating system (Kid, Myghty, Cheetah, Genshi, Clearsilver, etc.) But the more I use Python, the bigger fan I become. After only one week, I’m fluent enough to be writing useful stuff and I’m having more fun doing it. This is how I got started…
Snakes on my brain
First, I highly recommend picking up two books: Learning Python (ISBN: 0596002815) and Beginning Python (ISBN: 159059519X). Learning Python reads like a dry tome that would be right at home in an introductory CS class. It is very heavy on the theory (you don’t actually get to start doing anything until about page 60) and, being published almost five years ago, is somewhat outdated. However, it explains crucial details about how Python works under the hood. For example, unlike any language I’ve ever used, variables are simply references to objects. This might sound insignificant, but consider the following code and it’s output in a Python interactive prompt:
>>> languages = ["Pascal", "Python", "Perl", "PHP"]
>>> thepeas = languages
>>> print thepeas
['Pascal', 'Python', 'Perl', 'PHP']
>>> print languages.pop()
PHP
>>> print thepeas
['Pascal', 'Python', 'Perl']
>>> print thepeas.pop()
Perl
>>> print languages
['Pascal', 'Python']
As you can see, both languages and thepeas are two references to the same object, changing one affects the other. This would have been a very frustrating concept to initially encounter if I hadn’t read Learning Python first.
On the other hand, Beginning Python was published in only 2005 and seems to be better aimed at the self-instruction crowd. It moves along quite a bit faster and includes a greater number of examples. Plus, I find the author’s style of writing more approachable. However, pace and praticality comes at the cost of glazing over some rather important theory. I’ve been reading both books concurrently and find that this approach allows me to soak up more information and helps keep my attention. If you have to choose one book though, get Beginning Python.
Tale of two committees
Finallly getting into the mix; writing code, reading the online docs and my books, and browsing tutorials, I am immediately struck with a key difference in philosophy: PHP was created soley with web development in mind, while Python is a Swiss Army Knife. When using PHP, I just fire up my text editor, add a “<?php” and get cranking. Testing normally consists of FTPing or SCPing the .php file to my server and hitting “Reload” in my browser. Form data is easily accessable with $_POST[’stuff’] and MySQL extensions are most likely installed too. PHP is preconfigured on almost every Apache web server and everything Just Works™–which is why I (and everyone else) learned PHP in the first place.
Python, however, doesn’t know what you want to do with it out of the box. It’s a very modular tool that feels right at home either crunching scientific data or processing HTML forms. Fitting with Python’s “batteries included” mantra, you can do almost all of these things without having to download any additional libraries (and if you can’t find a built-in library that does what you want, just head over to the Cheese Shop). However, because it would be hugely wasteful to automatically load every library into memory, Python does require this be done manually with the import statement: “import re” will get you regular expressions, “import pdfgen” will allow you to generate PDFs, “import this” will give you geek poetry (yes, really), etc. Using Python for web development will most likely entail installing and configuring mod_python on Apache, or using the CGI handler. Database interaction modules also have to be manually imported. Doing all of this isn’t difficult, or even time-comsuming, but it does require adapting to the Python way of thinking: “Batteries included… Some assembly required.”
Flexibility, thy name is Python!
If you have the patience to relearn a few things, Python can be very rewarding. I best learn by building stuff that I need, so I decided that my first project would be an offline web-browser / site cacher. It’s not the simplest thing to start with, but it would help me evaluate Python in a real-world application. The program would connect to a site, download the HTML document and its associated images and stylesheets, convert absolute URLs to relative URLs, and save everything to disk with the same directory structure. Having never used Python before, from start to finish, this project took me two days to complete. “Bah!,” I can hear the readers now, “I could have done the same thing in PHP in a quarter of the time and I wouldn’t have had to learn anything new!” While that may be true, four hours after finishing the initial version, I had also converted the crawler into a multithreaded application that improved its performance by a factor of ten. Try that with PHP.
Source: RightBrain Networks, LLC
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