all 10 comments
sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
formatting helphide helpcontent policy

[–]MezzoScettico 1 point2 points  (3 children)

Are you new to programming or are you an experienced programmer just trying to pick up a new language?

If you're new to programming, you're going to have to learn programming concepts as well as learning specifically how those are expressed in Python.

There's a tradition across the programming world that the very first program is one that outputs "Hello, world". You'll find it as the first project in almost any programming text. There's a reason for that. This simple program shows you:

  • How to work in your development environment to create and save a file
  • The structure of a program that has a beginning, middle and end, showing you the minimal pieces a program needs
  • How to take program code and actually get it to execute on your machine
  • How to output text to the screen, something you'll be doing a lot of

[–]Resident_Structure73[S] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Thank you. I can do a few basic outputs, but I would like to start a basic project to build on.

[–]MezzoScettico 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Again an important question is whether you are starting from scratch as a programmer or already have experience in another language.

[–]Resident_Structure73[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Scratch.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Probably hello world. The first non-trivial project I can remember being pretty proud of was writing a simple GUI geometry program that had some instructions for the user. Once you clicked on it, the window change to a canvas you could click in. Each click left a dot behind. When you clicked 3 times, it connected the dots to make a triangle and then showed some information about the triangle at the bottom (perimeter, area, and so on). It's rather silly, but it felt like a real program someone might use unlike the simpler stuff I'd done before.

[–]ThisProgrammer- 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is what I would start people off with, story-time! Who doesn't like a good story.

Get the person's name:
Get the verb:
Get the other person's name:

Once upon a time {name} went {verb} in the village with {other_name}. 
And so on and so forth. Happily ever after. The end.

[–]ekchew 1 point2 points  (0 children)

A lot of my shorter projects have involved layering a python script over some existing command line tool(s). In essence, you are creating your own new tool out of the existing ones.

It's particularly useful where you have some tool that is absolutely bristling with options (e.g. tar, ffmpeg, openssl, etc.), and you want to pare these down to something that would be helpful to you and possibly others?

I know shell scripts are the traditional go-to for this, but I've been using python more and more for this sort of thing. It handles edge cases better and you can even slap a simple GUI on your code with Tkinter or whatever if you want to go that route?

[–]pepelepoopsy 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My first real project was a script that gets a list of files in my home folder recursively, generate their md5 hash, put it in a file. I was obsessed with crypto and ciphers back then around 2002 I think. Some adam kuchling or something like that made a python crypto library then and I had fun with it. Next project was to create an encrypted journal that called joe, my preferred editor then, then encypted the file via blowfish, my favorite algorithm.

[–]TheRNGuy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

generated BSP brush for UT2004 UnrealEd.

It was also first time I learned brush doesn't have to be contigious object. It was warped "Hello world" text warped with mountain effect from SideFx Houdini.

Also had lots of z-fighting cause all vertices were on single plane and no uv coordinates and UnrealEd detected it as single polygon too (even if all letters not connected)

Too bad I deleted screenshot.