John Salerno wrote: > So out of curiosity, I'm just wondering how everyone else came to learn > it. If you feel like responding, I'll ask my questions for easy quoting: > > Did you have to learn it for a job?
No. My job is purely administrative; I have absolutely no need to do any programming. I had done a *small* amount of programming (fortran, C) while studying Physics and wrote a few simple Java applets while teaching Physics. > > Or did you just like what you saw and decided to learn it for fun? More or less. In the summer of 2004 I felt I needed a hobby. I also thought I should introduce my kids to something useful about computers. I decided to combine both goals. I started writing an html tutorial for my kids and, while surfing the net for helpful resources, saw a few independent references to Python. Curious, I downloaded it just to see what it was like and, after trying a few things, I decided to forget about the html tutorial and proceeded to write one on Python for my kids, following more or less a traditional (boring) approach. > Also, how did you go about learning it? (i.e., like I described above, I > started with the main stuff then moved on to the different available > frameworks) Having taught Physics for a number of years, I realised that the best way to learn something is try to prepare to teach it to someone else. This is what I was trying to do for my kids. But, after spending a little over a month with Python, I stumbled upon Guido van Robot which inspired me to change course again and I started working on RUR-PLE. I had some ideas as to what RUR-PLE should look like, and just started building from scratch, first implementing the logic (no GUI) and then learning what I needed (like wxPython) as I went along. Being a newbie sometimes made it difficult to make things work the way I thought they should. I'm sure professional programmers/experts would be horrified if they were to look at the details of the code I wrote. My excuse: it works ... why break it? ;-) > Was there any necessity in the specifics you learned, or did you just > dabble in something (e.g. wxPython) for fun? Driven by the final goal in mind... The whole adventure has been for fun! > Are there still some things you feel you need to learn or improve? *Lots*. At the moment, it is webserver stuff for another project (Crunchy Frog), again designed to make teaching/learning Python more fun. > Additional comments/complains here: :) Programming in Python is fantastic as a hobby... when I can find the time. Since I started 2 years ago, I have gone for a few weeks (and once for 4 months) at a time without doing any programming. However, it is always easy to get back at it. I don't think I'd be able to say that with other languages. I have found members of the Python community to be generally extremely helpful and generous of their time, in answering my silly questions. I sometimes wish I had a different job, one which required me to do programming using Python. André -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
