Welcome to the blog of Can Sar, a Stanford CS major. This blog is made up of my thoughts on Computer Science and the computer industry, as well as ever exciting tales from my life.
Guido van Rossum gave a talk about Python 2.3 at Stanford this Wednesday. Till then I had not seen any Python code, and the only thing I knew about it was that it was usually grouped with Perl and Ruby (I know the first, not the latter) and that it was very easy to learn use.
I was very impressed by the talk, both by Guido and by the language. Meeting great people in CS is one of the best things about Stanford, and Guido obviously falls into this group. Python itself is fascinating. It is possible to switch a and b by writing a, b = b, a and the language is very thoughtfully designed towards simplicity, unlike Perl which uses lots and lots of special cases. This does not mean that I dislike Perl, but learning different approaches is very important to me.
Guido talked about Iterators and the for loop in Python 2.3 and the flexibility of the solution is amazing, it is very well though out, unlike it other languages, where iterators seem like an ugly hack.
Because of this (and because unlike ML, Python is actually a useful language), I started learning Python this Wednesday, and have been enjoying it a lot. If I manage to finish CS 143 in a reasonable amount I will borrow a Python book and go read it at the gym.