On 4/22/2016 1:40 PM, Michael Selik wrote:
Frankly, for someone coming from Java, the best advice is to not write any classes until you must. Of course classes in Python are very useful. It's just that your Java habits are unnecessary and often counter-productive.
I disagree. I wrote procedural scripts and translated old BASIC games into Python for two years. One day I came across a Python book that described the principles of subclassing from a base class for chess pieces, but there was no code to demonstrate the process. I had no problem creating the Python classes. That's how my research project got started to build a chess engine. If you ever check the academic literature for chess programming, this research project could turn into a lifelong endeavor.
I had to confront all the bad habits I brought over Java and change my code to be more Pythonic. This is where I started having fun, learning the tricks and collapsing multi-line code into a single line code. I've learned more about Python in the few weeks than I had in two years of writing procedural scripts and translating BASIC goto hell.
Thank you, Chris R. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
