[python-uk] Tell us what you did with Python this year....

[Alec Battles]

> As an attempt to generate some content and balance out the "jobs" discussion....
>
> Why don't a few people here tell us what they got up to this year?
> Neat projects at work, things you learned about Python in 2010, things
> you've been playing with....
>
> I'm having a mad day but will try to post mine tonight or tomorrow...

Great question, and a welcome one. I don't use Python as much as I
thought I would when I started learning it. But it's been great fun to
play around with the NLTK natural language processing library. I'm
quite a language enthusiast, so using it to find word frequencies and
such (which is just the tip of the iceberg) was fun. Unicode
interoperability is a pain, though, and I find it depressing to work
with in Python2.x, because it never seems to behave predictably. I
still have no idea why tokenizing Hungarian text and tokenizing German
text are not fundamentally the same operation, for instance, but I
assume it has to do with the messiness of ASCII standards around the
two languages. And since more than half of the languages I've studied
require unicode compatibility, I've dropped Python entirely until NLTK
goes Python3.