What was the project that made you feel skilled in Python?
Roy Smith
roy at panix.com
Sun May 19 10:05:28 EDT 2013
In article <mailman.1844.1368963057.3114.python-list at python.org>,
Ned Batchelder <ned at nedbatchelder.com> wrote:
> So here's a question for people who remember coming up from beginner: as
> you moved from exercises like those in Learn Python the Hard Way, up to
> your own self-guided work on small projects, what project were you
> working on that made you feel independent and skilled? What program
> first felt like your own work rather than an exercise the teacher had
> assigned?
IIRC, my first production python projects were a bunch of file parsers.
We had a bunch of text file formats that we worked with often. I wrote
some state-machine based parsers which slurped them up and gave back the
contents in some useful data structure.
Many of the files were big, so I added an option to write out a pickled
version of the data. The parsing code could then check to see if there
was a pickle file that was newer than the text version and read that
instead. Big win for speed.
Then, of course, a bunch of utilities which used this data to do useful
things. I remember one of the utilities that turned out to be really
popular was a smart data file differ. You feed it two files and it
would tell you how they differed (in a way that was more useful than a
plain text-based diff).
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