Lessons Learned from Writing My First Python Script

After 25 years of coding in C and Perl.

As an independent author/researcher, there is of course nothing in my “job description” that says I should code in Python (or any other language). Yet for a long time, I thought coding in Python would help me a lot. It would mean more readers, and thus eventually, more revenue. At one point I advertised a job position, looking for people to translate my Perl scripts into Python. I thought doing it myself would take a lot of time with a long learning curve.

I was wrong. I am glad that I jumped into the Python bandwagon. It was much easier than I thought. Of course I still have to learn plenty of things. Here I relate my experience, learning Python on my own, without attending any class, without reading any book on the topic. I hope my experiment will help people do things they hesitate to do, be it learning a new language or anything else. Some readers mentioned that what I did inspire them to move forward with some projects, rather than following inertia.

Read the full article, including advice from me feedback from professional Python programmers, here. The article also includes the source code and data set, to solve a modern machine learning problem.