Some 411 of my own

Saturday, Robin and I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Ron Stephens for the excellent Python 411 podcast. I think this was the first time I've ever been interviewed for anything, and while it's always fun to talk about Python, the book, and me (not necessarily in that order), it does take some getting used to.

Anyway, I do mention this here blog during the interview, and while I don't want to talk about the actual interview in detail until I hear the edited version, it did occur to me that I might want to have some actual Python content on board in case anybody comes by to check the place out.

Python content all week, then, starting with today's Things I Love About Python:

1. Whitespace. I know that I said just a few short days ago that I wasn't going to redefend Python's whitespace blocks. That was then, this is now. Now, I'm just going to gush over them. I love using whitespace to mark blocks. It enforces what I'd be doing anyway. It encourages consistent style, with the result that other people's Python code is actually intelligible. It encourages short methods and shallow nesting, both good habits, and it lets you get about 10-25% more code on a page. Nobody is ever going to have an Obfuscated Python contest (okay, I looked it up... somebody has, but they realize it's a joke.
   
   
2. List Comprehensions. One of my favorite syntax features in any language. So concise and yet so clear... Try to describe the following any more clearly in any language, programming or not.
   
   [x.name for x in students if x.grade > 90]
   
   Okay, they do sometimes blow up if you make them too complicated.
   
   
3. First Class Functions. It's easier to pass around named function objects in Python than in just about any language not named Lisp. This is a very good thing. It enables all kinds of elegant abstractions (especially since classes and instances can all be made callable). Over time, using Python has made all my coding move to a more functional style that's easier to test, verify, and maintain.
   

Of course, not everything in Python needs to be elegant and abstracted. Last night I had a problem. I wanted to download all episodes of a popular podcast that does not have an easily accessible archive page. Rather that walk through months of postings, I decided to write a script that would take advantage of the pages naming conventions, loop to find the shows for given days, find the downloadable URL and download, then add to iTunes. Final code, just under 60 lines. Elapsed time, under 45 minutes start to first download, including downloading, installing, and using a new library (Beautiful Soup, which is a nice HTML parser). The point is not that I'm particularly good at this (the script is a little sloppy and doesn't handle error conditions well), but that Python is particularly good at this. Plus, it was fun -- no fighting with compilers and interpreters, able to find support for the libraries when I needed it.