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Saying hello to Python: observations from a newbie

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The last few weeks i’ve been dabbling around with Python. I’m busy doing some experiments with OpenCV, and because it has Python bindings it seemed like a good excuse to dive a little bit more into Python.

Here are some of my observations, from somebody with a background in mostly frontend jobs, usually Javascript/Node.js and/or PHP.

Good

Could be better

Here’s an example. Let’s say i want to know how to do the Python equivalent of PHP’s foreach. The docs about the for statement say this:

The for statement is used to iterate over the elements of a sequence (such as a string, tuple or list) or other iterable object:

for_stmt ::=  "for" target_list "in" expression_list ":" suite
      ["else" ":" suite]

Right, so what does that mean? What’s ::=? What’s an ‘expression list’?

The expression list is evaluated once; it should yield an iterable object. An iterator is created for the result of the expression_list. The suite is then executed once for each item provided by the iterator, in the order of ascending indices.

“Ascending indices”? “Suite”? This might be clear for a CI professor, but it’s not for the mere mortals that read the docs and want to get stuff done.

And after reading this section i still don’t know how to do foreach in Python :(

Nice that the search works on the offline download though.

So, that’s my list. What are the things you like and hate about Python?

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