02 May 2018
First experiences with Python
At the new job I use Python for my programming tasks. Currently developing some data related stuff (ETL and reporting) and a web service, trying to organize the stuff I write so that it can be used by other members of the team for other projects. I will register a few impressions:
- Overall, I like the syntax. More specifically, I like the fact there are very few principles that uniformly apply in many situations. Most of the time I can "invent" the way something has to be written and it usually turns out as the right form.
- I like the ecosystem I've seen so far: pandas is a great tool, for example. I'm struggling with SQLAlchemy, but I never quite liked ORMs anyway.
- I am trying to follow PEP8, even if I have quite different ideas at least about aestethics in code (first time I run pylint on a script I scored -8.61/10).
- I didn't quite get yet the way modules are organized on the file system.
- I feel the documentation lacks regularity and completeness. I can find a lot of tutorials about any topic, but I still could not find a systematic source to use as a reference.
Update
Speaking of great tools in the Python ecosystem, I just discovered Jupyter received the ACM Software System Award. Congratulations!