[sapug] Introduction

[John Steele Scott]

I tried sending this on Saturday, but it hasn't turned up. Third time
lucky maybe?

I've been waiting for GMANE to setup a feed for this list, but so far it
hasn't happened, so in the meantime I guess I'll subscribe, and reply to
the "Introduction" post I read in the archives.

At the moment I'm working with embedded temperature logging systems. I
use Python on an Ubuntu box to communicate with the (PIC-based) embedded
system, to help me with testing and debugging. Usually I have my
embedded code in one Emacs screen, with another Emacs screen containing
the Python test code and the Python REPL.

The other area I've found Python useful is for prototyping GUI
applications with wxPython. These are end-user programs for controlling
the above-mentioned embedded systems. Unfortunately last time I had to
go back and re-implement the application in C++, so that the app could
be contained in a single Windows exe file. The Tcl/Tk starpack solution
would've been good for this. Is anyone aware if there is an equivalent
for Python yet?

In my free time these days I find that my brain is too fried to do
programming. :( When my brain is up to it, I'm studying the Scheme
programming language. Although I haven't got very far with it yet, I
think I can already relate to an observation I read on an MSDN blog that
"Lisp is a Curse".[1]

I'm glad to see a SA Python user group, although I hope that excursions
into other dynamic languages will be tolerated. Especially since we
already have a Ruby troll on the list. :)

cheers,

John


[1]
<http://blogs.msdn.com/sriram/archive/2006/01/15/lisp_is_sin.aspx#513270>