This afternoon I made a decision. I’m going to learn Python! I have no idea why, but I want to try something new and Python seems to have a vibrant community. That, and it’s used by NASA.

Since I’m going in as a total “noob” I will fully describe my experiences regarding Python. I come from a c# background, and this is the first scripting language I will tackle.

First things first: what will I need?

• An IDE. Ooooh, sacrilege! I know, but I don’t like VIM/Emacs/… . Well, I like VIM but not for programming. I’m trying to learn Python here, not an editor! I’ve choosen SPE IDE because it looks nice and I’m about to install Ubuntu in parallels.
• An unit testing framework. Luckily, this is built in in Python.
• Inspiration/Challenges. I think I’ll start with the python challenge and work up to the instant-classic dvd-management application. Or something to catalogue my books.
• An ORM. I think this will warrant a seperate blog post. For now I’m going with storm on sqlite.
• A windowing toolkit/A web framework. Like my friend used to say: “fuck the user interface, let’s do art”

That’s it for today.