Author: Philip Stubbs Date: To: Hampshire LUG Discussion List Subject: Re: [Hampshire] Whatever happened to programming?
I am not a programmer, but this thread makes me feel that I am not
alone in my thoughts.
At work, I have a small task that involves extracting data from a data
logger, and munging it into a format suitable for graphing. A small
perl script does this just fine, but I normally end up editing the
script every time I use it. This led me to think that I should have a
go a writing a decent program with options to cover all common uses of
the data. With such a lot being said about Python, I thought that it
would be good to use the opportunity to learn that language.
The problem was that it is so boring looking for a suitable module to
do whatever. I just know that there must be a module that will read a
csv file, allow me to munge the data a bit, then export in tab format.
In the end, I have started writing the thing in C. Just getting it to
read a single row of data into an array and printing it to screen was
a real buzz. Trying to get my head round pointers and arrays is like a
real mental workout. A real feeling of satisfaction when it works.
Much more fun than plugging some modules together.
