I’ve begun learning some Python, primarily because Mark found an open source 3D graphics package called Blender, which uses packages written in Python.
So far, it looks like it’s similar in many ways to Perl, which is good because I already have plenty of experience with Perl, having used it for my final year project. Also, Lorcan is talking about doing some screen-scraping on major websites to glean data like movie showtimes and current stock prices, to be fed into Construct as contextual data.
I’ve done some screen-scraping in Perl before, but I’m guessing most of the others won’t want to code their screen-scrapers in Perl too. This will lead to serious code maintainability problems, which will invariably happen since every time the source website is updated you may have to recode some or all of your corresponding screen-scraper. Such is the life we’ve chosen. It would be best if we didn’t have to have designated caretakers for each module, so standardising on one language for them all would be nice. And I know which way the tide is turning (Joe characterised Perl with “I don’t like any language where my cat can walk across the keyboard and it will still compile” — touché).
Update: I’ve done some work on a scraper in Python.
One Response to “Learning Python”
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I go with Joe…
Try to thing about this assignment in terms of the software engineering involved. ie. an interface between components that can change where you would like to automatically detect this and perhaps loads up an alternate scrapper component as a result, perhaps a simpler one. ie. you have a tailored scrapper but you never know when or where the content publishers will mess with the interface so you ripple back to a more basic scrapper at each stage being able to test that what you scrap is content and not noise…
Aaron.
§ Comment by Aaron on December 9th, 2005 at 2:18 am