Thinking about learning Python

[Eel Snave]

I've been poking around at it, and I'm getting the itch to learn it.  It seems fairly powerful.  What does the hivemind think?

[EngineNo9]

We use it for generating some real code here at work.    It just does the grunt work of generating our basic message header and cpp files from an xml that it parses.

I've messed with our python scripts a bit and as someone who has used C/C++ extensively it seems a bit goofy and not as powerful.  Those that have used it a lot seem to think that it is pretty swell.  I'm sure given enough time and experience I could get used to it.

What sort of stuff were you looking to use it for? 

[Eel Snave]

Games.  I know Civ 4 was built with it, but I want a language that enables me to make some really simple applications and gives me a little flexibility.  I would also like to hover.

[EngineNo9]

I would guess that the majority of Civ4 was written in C++ with Python used for scripting and such.  Actually I just looked on Wikipedia and is says that "Major parts of the interface, map generation, and scripted events are written entirely in Python and can be customized."  We use Lua for similar functions.

I'm sure there are people who write games in Python, but I would be surprised to see any commercial products that do (perhaps excepting some puzzle games or something). 

Mabye I should just shut my mouth, though, since I really don't have worthwhile experience with Python. 

[Brendan]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we do nothing at all with Python at my work, but it's definitely got the most apropos O'Reilly cover, so that's a point in its favor, right?

[Huw the Poo]

I'm sure there are people who write games in Python, but I would be surprised to see any commercial products that do (perhaps excepting some puzzle games or something). 

Not quite what you mean, but if I recall correctly Eve Online's entire networking code is written in Python.

[EngineNo9]

I'm sure there are people who write games in Python, but I would be surprised to see any commercial products that do (perhaps excepting some puzzle games or something). 

Not quite what you mean, but if I recall correctly Eve Online's entire networking code is written in Python.

That's right, I was actually just talking with a colleague who said Eve uses some form of stackless Python, which I have even less knowledge about.  Might be worth your time to check into that, Lee. 

[Hamsterball_Z]

If you want to do game programming in Python you might want to look at PyGame.  It's a Python code library for creating games.  I'm no programmer but I've messed around with a number of languages and Python is one of my favorites.  If you've never programmed before it's a good place to start.