Hello Python! 

I speak German, conversationally. Actually, I have a repertoire of rehearsed German expressions that I execute (nearly flawlessly), to convince the less initiated that I have a mastery over the language: “Hallo, Guten Tag. Geht es alles gut mit dir? Ja, Ich spreche Deutsch; Ich habe es in der Oberschule studieren. Ich habe noch nie Deutschland besuchen, aber eines Tages, würde Ich mag es zu reisen. Warum bist du in Den Stadt?” Hello, good day. Is everything going well with you? Yes, I speak German; I studied it in high school. I haven’t visited Germany yet, but I would like to go there someday. What brings you to the city? At that point, after a nod of satisfaction and approval, my new Freunde will mimic, and obligingly switch to English. No one is the wiser.

This is roughly my relationship with programming languages.

Put me in a conversation with programmers, and I can talk the verse of conditional statements, debugging, and name-drop a few salient icons…for about three questions deep; after that, I’m calling my Computer Science friends to outsource help. I’ve gotten by on the more designer-friendly “languages” (true coders would gawk at the term) I can HTML, and CSS; I can generally keep my head above water reading JavaScript; I actually have fun – true entertainment – writing macros for Excel; but, it’s right around MySQL and PHP that I start browsing the web for templates, or throwing my hands up in despair.

Enter Python. I purchased Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science by John Zelle. It was one of those “you know you’re a nerd when…” moments, where you’re browsing online for a textbook, denying a request from a friend to go out clubbing. Already in the third chapter, I’m finding the style easily absorbed, and I’m getting the courage to begin experimenting with a couple of personal projects. I’m interested in data; I love massive amounts of information organized in individual bytes. I feel smart, adjusting my glasses, as I sift through lines and lines of numbers and characters with a Matrix-like understanding and meaning.

I’ve decided to recreate my Rooted Coffee-Table project with a more robust program than that which Excel can create. I would like to manipulate the Minimal Surface Forms through mathematical coding parameters alone, as opposed to the brute-force labor of 3d modeling. I’ll be happy, if I can at least draw a cube, let alone a super robust polyhedron. Here’s to happy coding. I’ll update my progress in a month’s time.