Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Python in 100 Seconds" video.

  1. Key points to remember about Python: * Every name you can define is a variable. This also includes function and class definitions: they are not declarations as in other languages, they are just special forms of assignment statement. * Every value (that you can return from an expression, put into a variable etc) is an object. * Functions and classes are also objects. * Every object is an instance of some class.
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  2. Worth noting that Larry Wall, renowned creator of Perl and Patch, described laziness and hubris as two of the most important programmer virtues.
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  3. Jupyter is great for “scratchpad” programming, when you are trying things out.
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  4. All the compute-intensive stuff is done in lower-level toolkits like NumPy, which are written in C or other such fast, compiled languages. So for example if you have an array of a million data points, you would not process them one by one in Python, you would let the lower-level toolkit perform some operation on them in bulk.
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  5.    Every name in Python is a variable. That means its value can vary, by assigning a new value. That’s what “variable” means.
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  6.    If you are objecting to the way Python is designed, take it up with the Python designers. I am merely pointing out how it actually works.
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  7. The GIL is integral to the reference-counting memory management system. Get rid of it, and Python becomes totally garbage-collected, like Java. You wouldn’t want that. Because currently you can write Python programs which run for a long time with reasonable memory requirements; if it became like Java, then you would need to impose a limit on the heap size to keep it from gobbling up all the memory on your system.
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  8. Not just strings, but any value of a sequence type can be multiplied by an integer to perform replication.
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