October 2008

I always knew about this language but I was so busy with PHP and daily work that I didn’t really get to learn it and whenever I looked at the syntax, it scared me, I didn’t want to learn another syntax so I decided to learn it later.

About a month ago, I came across Python and got a chance to play with it and I have to say WOW!

It is one of the coolest languages I’ve ever seen, the syntax is cool, the laziness is cool.
It has a great library and you can do anything you want basically.

To see some cool things, go ahead and download the Python interpreter here:
http://www.python.org/download/

Get the latest version and after you are done, run it and type these:
(Note: You will have to hit enter/return twice at the end of last line.)

import urllib2
def get_url(url, num):
	contents = urllib2.urlopen(url)
	print str(num) + " done!"

Tabs are important!

Then go ahead and type these:

for i in range(0, 100):
	get_url("http://www.yahoo.com/", i)

Note how clean this is, the code speaks for itself.

As you can see the output looks like this:
0 done!
1 done!
2 done!
3 done!
4 done!
5 done!
6 done!
7 done!
8 done!
9 done!
…

Now I will show you some of Python’s powers, go ahead and type these:

import thread
for i in range(0, 100):
	thread.start_new_thread(get_url, ("http://www.yahoo.com/", i))

Wow! This is so great, imagine how much you can do with this language.
Also note that, I’m not an advance python programmer and I’m still learning but this language will take over the world one day.

The only thing about PHP is that it can be embedded inside web pages but it would be very easy to write a template engine in Python to do this.

It could be like PHP’s Smarty but with Python syntax and could compile the templates into Python scripts and run them instead of compiling every time. It would then check for the mime time of the file and would recompile if there were any changes.

I’m having so much fun playing around with Python and have never been this excited about a programming language