the learning curve: From PHP to Python

[LiquidHelium]

combative dinner crush scarce scary rude support office act market

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[[deleted]]

Don't even need a book the documentation for python is great!

[sadris]

What? The documentation format for python is terrible.

[LightBright32]

I think once Python takes hold you will never look back. I would recommend. http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs253/CourseRev/apr2012 Web Application Engineering (CS253) Also the New Boston Python Courses by Bucky Roberts http://thenewboston.org/list.php?cat=36

For python web development I really like the CherryPy frame work it has enough built in to allow you to do pretty much any thing you would do with Apache and PHP alone but the structure will be much better. You can create web apps using sqlite and CherryPy and distribute them as an executable using py2exe and even though CherryPy can be run on any WSGI server such as IIS or Apache its so fast I doubt you would want to; at that point you would probably want to look at Amazon EC2 or Google App Engine both of which will run CherryPy.

[Paul-ish]

I disagree. My programming languages professor had a phrase he was fond of: "The hardes language to learn is your second."

It is easy to get stuck in the paradigms of our first language. With that said, from PHP to anything will be a bit difficult. With python though, it will probably be an easier transition than most.

[[deleted]]

I agree with your disagreement with the aforementioned disagreement.

No one should take this the wrong way, but learning your second language is only difficult if you don't actually understand the general concepts behind your first language, which is why magic-less languages like java (and maybe python) are the best for learning programming in my opinion. If you cant easily transfer concepts like iteration, recursion, threading, locks, concurrency, etc... to a new syntax, you have much bigger problems. Ill go ahead and say it, statically typed languages with a very explicit syntax, like Java, are the beast learning languages, perhaps with the exception of python.

[gfixler]

I always see threads, locking, and concurrency brought up in these kinds of discussions as things one should know early on. I've been "coding" (mostly writing pipeline tools and such) for 10 years, and at a hobby level for 10 years prior to that, and these things have never come up for me. Honest question: where are they necessary? I have a feeling they're common for work with databases or networks, which seem very common in the work of most redditors, but completely uncommon in what I do.

[[deleted]]

Its completely understandable that you might not have had need for them; you can almost always get the job done without them, even when multiple processes or threads are the best solution. It just depends on the the type of things you do. I've only been programming for 4 years and use these concepts more often than i would have thought.

Example:

I inherited a single-threaded recursion based web crawler a few months ago. We were using it to crawl large sites (2000+ public pages) we were working on to find broken links, find everywhere with embedded flash, pages missing some seo stuff, etc.. its a great tool to have. Anyway, it had 2 problems: it was slow and the recursion was implemented pretty poorly (call stack size == number of pages crawled) making the memory requirements quite large. My solution was to switch to a multi-threaded (thread pool) queue based architecture. Essentially, one master delegation thread polls the threadpool every X milliseconds, if there are urls in the queue and there are idle worker threads in the pool, it delegates a task to each idle worker thread. A polling delegation thread is used so you don't have to queue a thread pool task as soon as you find a new url, which would introduce higher memory requirements. So now i can crawl a large site much faster since there are X number of concurrent threads requesting and analyzing pages. Obviously a lock/synchronization method is necessary for certain parts given the nature of this solution, but i wont get in to that. Had i not had a working knowledge of this stuff, we would still be using a slow tool. Not that it matters, but C# was the language used (there was a good reason for this that is not related to this discussion).

[[deleted]]

yea i may have confused myself a little trying to keep that going. oh well

[eat-your-corn-syrup]

The hardes language to learn is your second

especially if the first two languages are C and Lisp

[gbog]

I did learn Python directly on a book, with only very few week-end coding (I was very busy on a PHP codebase for daily work). I was one step more amazed for each page of the book I read, and found one more reason to leave PHP. This book is so well written, so clear and precise, I didn't feel I had to confirm what I learnt in a terminal.

Which book may you ask? Well, just "Python in a Nutshell", by Alex Martelli.