Never too old to program

Ease-of-use and portability with different operating systems have made Python one of the most popular programming languages for people of all ages, says ANIL SETH

One of the problems of growing older in the IT profession is that one’s knowledge seems dated. One’s programming skills may date back to the Stone Age of Cobol and Fortran. One normally does not get enough time or is not able to concentrate long enough to, say, learn Java. It is possible that I am incorrectly extrapolating my own failures, offering excuses for my own laziness. Even so, it is well worth the effort for us, senior citizens, to learn Python.

Python is an interpreted, object-oriented programming language similar to Perl, that has gained popularity because of its clear syntax and readability. One of the beauties of Python is that it is a ‘glue’ language. It is easily extended with modules/packages from C and C++. It was much easier for me to explore wxWindows using wxPython instead. A quick understanding of the feasibility of what we wanted to do was possible. The surprising thing for me was that I could do it myself without the help of my younger colleagues and without any experience of GUI programming. The major gain was that it is often easier to try and show the code rather than explain a nebulous idea floating in one’s head. Not to mention that trying out an idea is frequently useful for discarding the silly or needlessly complicated brainwaves.

Python was immensely useful for me in exploring object-oriented programming ideas, clarifying my doubts, and clearing up the misconceptions. I became sufficiently sold on the language to be convinced that the first programming language that is taught to engineers and programmers should be Python.

Bifocal problem

Before we start impressing our younger colleagues, let us discuss a solution to the bifocal problem faced by us elderly people. Mouse and eye coordination starts becoming harder. We play a game of solitaire and our hand starts to ache. We have a PC on our table and search for a calculator. It is surprisingly difficult to move the cursor to the right square. A slight distraction and we are wondering, "Where on earth is the mouse cursor?" We can simplify this problem by using the Python interpreter as a pretty smart calculator. We bypass the mouse and use the keyboard. A nice side effect is that we can use complex numbers as well, useful for helping our children with school work, if not to solve managerial problems.

Among the biggest and most challenging technical/ managerial problems these days is e-mail. The problem is how to organise and search messages. I do not mean just for an individual but for a corporate entity as well.

Managing e-mail

XML is hot and, as we just mentioned, managing e-mail is a big headache. I read a sample chapter from a book on Python by Sean McGrath talking about combining the two. This chapter explained how one could use the rfc822 module and with a simple program easily convert an e-mail into an XML document, which can then be invaluable for further processing. Python documentation led to the discovery of the e-mail module which supersedes rfc822. Experimenting interactively with these modules in Python may be the best approach to explore ideas about how e-mails should be stored, retrieved, protected, etc.

How do we handle the issues of some e-mails being a corporate resource and some being personal, even if related to company work? These are not technical concerns, but we need to clarify them and understand the implication for data management, so that technical solutions can be implemented.

Before anyone misunderstands, this is not to imply that what is described above is somehow unique to Python. What is remarkable about Python is hard to describe—it is an overall quality that seems to make it easy to do complex programming in Python. As Eric Raymond has written "... I was generating code nearly as fast as I could type. ... This was my first clue that in Python, I was actually dealing with an exceptionally good design."

First steps

Okay, so you’re convinced by now, I hope. But where does one start?

It is easy to find a lot of information about Python and the wealth of library modules now available—the obvious place to start is www.python.org. After that, before being overwhelmed by the volume of choices, look at the following tutorial—Non-Programmers Tutorial For Python (www.honors.montana.edu/~jjc/easytut/easytut) by Josh Cogliati.