Andy Chase

It's that time of year again. I was moving forward by leaps and bounds on SnapSnap, and then I came down with a nasty cold/flu for the better part of a week. Too fuzzy headed to trust myself not to write sloppy code on the project, I instead returned to my JavaBook and split my time between reading, typing in code samples and excercises, and blowing my nose.

That weekend, I dug out my outdated copy of O'Reilly's Learning Python, and began re-reading that as well. It had been almost two years since I bought that book, and at the time I didn't make much progress. With the benefit of the additional PHP programming experience I've gained in the meantime, I found the book to be a weird combination of hand-holding and overexplanation; it's frustratingly slow paced and yet full of esoteric asides about memory optimization and the language's C underpinnings. I turned instead to the official Python Tutorial, and Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Python, and began a new ProgrammingStuff section on Python.

People generally seem to be divided into two groups about Python... the ones who sneer at the whitespace-dependent syntax and the ones who become fanatically excited by its elegance after about 30 minutes of fooling with it. I fall squarely in the second camp.

The only problem is, there are probably even fewer Python jobs out there right now than PHP Jobs, so I really need to evaluate the amount of time I devote to tinkering with it.

There are quite a few Java jobs out there (as compared to PHP jobs), but I know I have a long, hard road ahead of me before I can hope to be hired as a Java programmer. I've learned enough to know that, at least for the types of projects I've been developing on my own time so far, it's not the language I would reach for first. I like it a lot better than what little C I have learned in the past, but strong typing isn't very conducive to rapid development, or writing code as easily readable as, say, Python.

While I understand and to a certain degree buy into the philosophy behind Java's strong typing, I think Guido Van Rossum's comments about strong vs. weak typing best sum up my own feelings on the matter.

So, SnapSnap has gotten lost in the shuffle for a couple of weeks. Actually, it's close to three weeks now. I've had an interesting e-mail exchange with a potential collaborator that is going to get me back on track with it, although it looks like it's going to result in some pretty serious changes (for the better) to the system's inner architecture.

And on top of everything remains the fact that I remain unemployed. I have been sending my resumes hither and yon across Massachusetts, and trying to decide what types of retail establishments I would be least miserable at if it comes to that.

Time to refocus on something, which is probably going to be SnapSnap.