Status Updates From Learning Python

Finished Chapter 29, Class Coding Details. His explanations of OOP are so intuitive and from 1st principles, Part VI is probably the only reason why I don't want to give this book 1 star, despite my frustrations with previous parts.

I now understand why people found OOP so alluring, & why it's in principle orthogonal to FP (per Odersky), & why it's ultimately about inheritance and nothing else.

Chapter 28. Really really liking his first principle explanation of OOP. First time I'm not annoyed with the book.

Chapter 26. OOP: The Big Picture is incredibly lucid. He boils down OOP to inheritance, explains how inheritance works, mentions that classes are objects and instances are also objects, shows the logic behind class attributes vs self.

He understands Python deeply, he just has the wrong idea what Learning Python should be pedagogically.

Part V was the most frustrating yet. Seriously considering giving this book 1 star. The constant switching between Python 2 and 3 made Chapter 24 practically unreadable. It's true, Python is a complex language masquerading as a simple language. God bless FP for existing, otherwise there'd be no hope for the future of programming.

Finally finished Part IV. Couldn't be bothered with his benchmarking code and Part IV exercises. I'll study function argument syntax and profiling (https://docs.python.org/3/library/deb...) via Python docs in the future instead.

This guy is the embodiment of “The future is now, old man!” He seems to complain about Python 3 changes everywhere.

Chapter 18. Arguments. I wonder how often Haskellers in practice have to simulate keyword arguments with record passing.

Ch17 was the longest (in terms of how it felt). I definitely learned a lot.

Mark is so repetitive. He has an obsessive desire to make a Ch describe everything under the sun that is relevant to the topic. But that requires forward-referencing, so if he talks about topic X, he says “and this is how you do it with Y, but we haven't learned Y yet, so this is just a preview” multiple times!

What's the difference between this & HtDP? Both seemingly do “from easy to hard”. Except HtDP by that means “identify a small set of essential building blocks, then introduce harder ones” — hence BSL/ISL progression. Where Mark reasons “classes are harder than functions, so I'll talk about functions first”, but coz some function-related topics overlap with classes, he has to mention classes multiple times anyway.

Done with Part III. Learned a bit more, than from Part II, especially that map/filter/zip are themselves iterators (compared to range, which's only an iterable). A Ch takes roughly an hour for me.