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August 16, 2004
Learning Python
Cannot remember why I bought Learning Python from Mark Lutz & David Ascher. Last time I stopped reading unfortunately right before the interesting stuff began. Matt, by indirect means, brought me back to this book after he got me to read Paul Graham's essay on great hackers. If programming interests you, I'd recommend both the book and the essay.
By stopping right before the interesting stuff, I mean stopping before the second half of the chapter on functions in Learning Python, especially the exercises, which demonstrate how to call functions with arbitrary lists or dictionaries of parameters, and how you can handle the typing dynamically to have these sorts of polymorphic functions where Python does all the work and you just do the logic.
That was the first time I ever got excited about a programming language. (The rest of my life must be pretty bleak by comparison with yours, which you probably already knew from reading this blog, unless your life is so bleak that you regularly read this blog.)
Let me know about any good books or tutorials that helped you learn Lisp.
Posted by Mark at August 16, 2004 08:34 AM