Python-advanced level-seminar: lifelong learning

I am currently traveling back from my very first paid educational leave. Proper selection, arrangement and preparation lead to some awesome impressions: about the capabilities of Python and about the city of Detmold.
Daniel Warner lead us – an assembly of five inquisitive men in the age-range from 30 to 60 – along the details and
specialties of that programming language. I learned much, in detail:

• basic structures; list comprehension
• classes; objects; overrides; imports; representation; init-method
• dictionaries for caching results (memoisation)
• decorators (nice for for printing, caching and thread-safety)
• descriptors, properties and slots, kwargs
• (multi-)inheritance and its quirks
• recursive functions; functional programming
• threads, synchronisation, atomic access

I put all the exercises (full script with my own annotations) into a Git-repository right from the beginning and published it: https://github.com/marcelpetrick/Python_FortgeschrittenenSeminar/.
Which also makes a nice view of the github-history 🙂

Python was chosen by me by intent: I see and plan for ways to use it with artifical intelligence (TensorFlow-binding ..); microcontroller-programming (ESP can run MicroPython) and for the Raspberry (currently the tumblr-upload-script for the catcam is also Python); for daily data-manipulation-tasks which are currently done more or less on Bash or AutoIt or Batch – and then: write it once, run it both on Linux and Win).
This was a great choice! And I want to thank my wife for supporting these stays absent from home and my plan to achieve the wanted education 🙂 And I got a small certificate – but that’s just icing on the cake.

My plan as first real exercise is to re-implement the “find all islands in the given map”-programming challenge. This will be fun. Getting to know some specialties and what properties/slots mean in Python-context (compared to the Qt-ones) was nice. And the decorators are a really powerful way to add special functionality to methods without bloating them and without blocking the view to the busines logic.