mattlary’s weblog

Python is awesome (Python is a programming language for all you non-techies). Derrick has been telling me that for a while, I just never made the time to play with it. So I sat down last night and played with it for a while and got some stuff written and working. It’s pretty easy to get the hang of, and you can throw things together very quickly. It seems like it could be used as a sort of swiss army knife of programming; if you need to do a quick and dirty task it has everything built in so you can just git-r-done.

They have some good tutorials on their site for both programmers and non-programmers; I haven’t tried the non-programmer version, but the programmer version was very easy to follow. I’d highly recommend checking out the tutorials and playing with it; it’s well worth knowing and I’m sure there will be a lot of instances where it would be useful.

BeanShell - Lightweight Scripting for Java

BeanShell is a cool thing I found a little while back; it’s a scripting environment for java.  At first I didn’t see the point, but when you bring up the BeanShell Desktop that’s included in the download, it gives you a console where you can test out java stuff.  It even lets you use Swing, or any other java library I suppose.  I use it mostly for testing out regular expressions, or for doing quick sanity checks to make sure my code is going to do what I expect it to do.  Check it out; I’m sure you can find something to use it for.