Python history

Tech, TV, Mobile, Internet and Geek Corner
1

Friday of monotonous data visualization work…so, having a documentary of python original developers as white noise.

I had not idea python was soooo old. 1990?

I first saw the snake icon in computers that had ArcGis 9.3 installed. 2007 or a bit later, don’t remember exactly. I used some scripts for work but never coded anything. Some weird people talked about this snake as Python.

Only until 2012 I met people that code with this thing. I inherited a project that relied on it on 2016 and it was time to get into it. Great for parsing data, pre and post-processing simulation data, visualization work, but a bit slow for actual calculations. Anyway, it’s great “sketching tool” I can code something, and give it to a real CS person who will make the job run in 0.05s in C++.

I’m still surprised because Python has become an important thing at work. I never imagined I would generate sales and income with Python, ever. So, thanks to developers from the 1980s!

1 Like
2

I’m learning it too. It’s everywhere. AI has adopted it. Microsoft has embedded it into Excel.

I guess it has now become essential to know.

3

and here I thought you guys were talking about comedy…

3 Likes
4

Which would be a good book to get into it?

5

try here: Python For Beginners | Python.org

6

for real beginners, probably Python Tutorial
I like their tutorials, every time I touched something very new, like css, js, I started there

1 Like
7

The w3 schools link sichuan shared is quite useful. I’ve used that website a lot.

Spyder is a nice graphical interface to code. Easy to see values held by variables, see how much time used in loops, etc.

This is my favorite data visualization module to work locally or send visualizations to colleagues/customers: plotly. Really complex stuff is packaged in an HMTL file and everyone has a web browser to open it.

plotly also works over the web: dash. I run a dash server in a virtual machine and colleagues access a dash app via the web browser. Not fancy, but data is easily accesible.

8

I am veeery confused now. I used to code at the university - Fortran77, Cobol, C++. I left it there, as I moved to a total different field. I had heard a lot about python, but as I’m out of the field, I didn’t bother. I do, nevertheless, some VBA coding for excel routines. I watched about 1 h of the video last night. Is VBA python based, or am I totally confused?

9

I’m not a software developer. It’s just that engineering work requires software tools that work with C++, Basic or Fortran :scream:. I try to substitute some of those tools with python to make my life easier.

Python is independent from VBA. It’s also older, this was my biggest surprise from the documentary.

10

VBA is Basic based.
Python is Python.

You can use either for Excel automation but not both together.
Both get compiled into the machine code which actually does the stuff.

If all your data remains within Excel, it’s probably better to stick with VBA but gathering data from other systems - Python will work better.

1 Like
11

I had to fact check you on the Python older than VBA, but you are right. It surprised me too.

I guess partly because VBA was very prominent when released and Python flew under the radar for a long time after invention.

12

Guido did work for Microsoft, eventually.