Hey guys...just a question really. My uncle is working out at Sandia Labs in NM. As far as i know he basically makes war games, which is pretty cool. Anyway, i'm interested in majoring in computer science in college and he said i should take a look at Python. Has anybody around here ever worked with Python? any comments on it?
Its basically a program language for begginers, to teach you the basic concepts of variables, constants, iterations, assignments, etc Personally if i were you i'd just jump into something like C++, VB or Delphi, since you'll get more practical use out of those than you will out of python.
Python has quite a few powerful features (ie you can do a email server/web browser in a couple of lines) but dont think you could write decent games in pytohn, Java/C++ as mentioned before are your best bet... Python is great to learn on, but may well be limiting in its game creating ability....
Python isn't a beginner's programming languge. It's probably easier to learn for a beginner than something like C or Java but it's an extremely powerful scripting language. A lot of professional games use python for the game logic, interspersed with C++. It shouldn't be restricted to traditional programming tasks either, it's great as a language to write shell scripts and the like. I'm guessing if you're doing CS you're either going to be taught or already have been taught other programming languages anyway. Just thought I would clear up some points as people seem to have thrown in lots of ideas about Python that are completely made up.
Python is a fantastic language, I think to dismiss it simply as a learning language is a little erroneous. It's object-oriented, portable, has an extensive set of libraries, built in garbage collection, interpreted.. probably closer to Java than C++. The code itself is really quite elegant, extremely readable - it uses indentation to group blocks of code, no { or } or ;. I've used it a fair bit in writing CORBA applications, both Python and C++, the effort required to produce the Python was easily half of what was needed in C++. It's just nice and quick to develop in, plus as Hargle says you can use it as a scripting language if you like, not as strong as Perl in that respect but infinitely more readable code if you have to go back to it and make changes a few years later.
yeah...last year we were taught c++, this year (AP CS) we're being taught Java...think i should take up python then?
python is much much simpler than java'/c++... basically a C++ program we wrote was twice as long as python... printing "hello world" is a simple as typing "print "hello world"" whereas in c++/java u have lots of "extras" to add!
Learning a new programming language is never a bad thing to do; it gives you far more choice. When it comes to writing a program, you can pick the best language for the task and it gives you greater insight into programming and computer systems in general. Take a look at some of the documentation, like the tutorial, on python.org.
