Jeroens blog

Last few days I had some time (while sitting on the train) to have a good look at the second part of the Python docs tutorial. I’ve now got a good understanding of everything up to classes, and know the most important language specific notations, behaviours and features.

So far, Python strikes me as a really nice language, with quite some features I haven’t come across before. Especially the data sequence types are neat, and you can do multi inheritance. There are a few things that I find rather odd though. These include the ability to simply add methods and fields dynamically to classes, and the inability to make class fields private, or write-only. This obviously goes against the encapsulation principle. A minor, but really awkward behaviour difference to the other languages I know is the working of the ‘whole division’-operator (in Python this is //). It works by doing a normal division and then math.floor’ing it. For positive numbers, this is no problems, but for negative numbers, you end up having a value that’s 1 off. For example, -7 // 2 will return -4, instead of -3.

Anyway, the final part of my Python studies will be to get a closer look at the Standard Library, how I can best compile applications into executables, and what GUI (and other) libraries I can use.

Today I made quite some progress learning the basics of Python. After doing a traditional  “O hai earf”, I went over the different core data types, control flow and data structures. Next in line are modules, I/O, exceptions and classes (yay!).

I’m testing my understanding of the language in Aptana Studio, which I now have completely mobile, together with the Python 3.1 interpreter. Aptana Studio is so nice it also offers build in support for Jython and Iron Python, which I’m planning to mess around with later on. And, not to forget, LOLPython!!!

I’ve finally made up my mind about whether I’m going to learn Python or Ruby. I’ve been looking at both for nearly 2 months now, and could not really find a strong reason to use the one or the other. So I’ve simply decided to learn both.

Both Ruby and Python have several good IDE’s. At Arrrr Camp 2009, I got recommended using Aptana RadRails for Ruby (on Rails) development. This IDE is based on Eclipse, so prompted an immediate download For Python, I’ve chosen PyDev, which is a plug-in for Eclipse or Aptana Studio.

I’ve put both IDE’s on my dev usb, and will start messing around with the languages as soon as I got some spare time.

Now the Google Summer of Code coding period has finished, I can divide my attention between multiple projects again. Since I’ve been doing PHP and JavaScript only for over 2 months now, I’m starting off with taking a PHP-break. This means I won’t do any development of mayor new features for Maps or Semantic Maps, and definitely won’t work on any other PHP project. Of course I’ll still ensure bugs get fixed for my mapping extensions, and help people out with code when needed, but that’s about it. So basically I’m closing my Zend Studio, which has become one of my most used applications in the last months, and starting my Visual Studio again. Now I think of it, this is really awkward. I used to start my VS practically every time I booted my computer for over a year, and then only opened it a handful of times in a 2 month period.

So, what am I going to work on now? One of my last projects before I started GSoC was a VB.Net background file downloader, of which I released an article on The Code Project, and later on created a C# version. I got quite some positive feedback on this project by people, although it was initially created with the sole purpose of helping that needed a simple downloader someone out, to improve my own skills, and to demonstrate how to create a simple to implement downloader. I’m now continuing this project, by rewriting it from scratch, to both add some mayor new features, and mess around with some multi-threading stuff I’ve been wanting to try out for months now.

The mayor new features that will be added are simultaneous downloads (the current classes only support one download at a time), segmented downloads (woot!), download priorities and bandwidth limitation options. This will require a nice OOP approach, with some more advanced multi-threading. I’m basing part of my code on MyDownloader, an extremely nice C# downloader, which has quite some more functionality then what I’m doing. It’s more extensive then required for most people though, and not all that easy to implement. I also don’t really agree with some naming choices, and it lacks both code docs for devs that want to modify it, and devs that want to implement it. So clearly, I’ll put a lot of effort in keeping the new project as small and to-the-point as possible, and pay attention to easy of implementation, and usability. Another obvious difference is that this project is in VB.Net and not C#.Net. This has more advantages then disadvantages IMHO. If the project is compiled to a .dll or is used in a multi-project solution, it simply doesn’t matter what language it uses. A lot of casual programmers don’t know how to handle either, and the majority of these uses VB.Net, and not C#. And the ones that do know C# are more likely to know VB.Net then the other way around.

I’ve created a project on SourceForge to host the code, and be able to commit to the project’s SVN. Since the project now contains multiple classes, I renamed it to .Net DownloadLib.

After that project I’m planing to put some real effort into my mapping extension for MediaWiki again, and possibly to have a look at Python and Ruby. When school starts again, somewhere half way through September, some new project opportunities will probably arise for me, but I guess I’ll see that then. I’m also looking forward to ‘learning to program’ at school, which is destined to give me some great laughs. Luckily for me I’ll have to learn C++ at university, so I won’t be totally bored with it. I hope they don’t drive the low-level aspects of the language to far, since that’s pretty useless in today’s world IMHO.