A Rubyist's Attempt on Working With Python - Setup and First Notes
I never really needed to look for another language to learn once I was acquinted with ruby some years back. I love it, and I really do. It provides clean code which does what it reads – it feels like the language was written for me, which was infact the idea behind ruby – a language made for developers.
But, anyways, I am giving Python another try for with hopes that it will be fruitful for me to learn the language. It has been, I think, 2-3 years since I last tried the language for some time, briefly. I have learned a lot in that duration in the Ruby world. And, I am hoping, if nothing else, this attempt at Python will make me a better rubyist. This post describes my notes on setting up a development environment for Python on OSX 10.8 (Mountain Lion), and some initial learning intakes.
Installation
I preferred not to use the Python distribution that comes with OSX for my dev
needs, which most Pythonista will agree with. The reason is simple – I do not
want the system based Python to get corrupted while my dev percussions, and is
the same reason why I use rbenv
for Ruby development.
So, I looked at some tutorials regarding this, and found that the good old
homebrew
that I love has again come up with a rescue. Moreover, it provides me
with pip
and setuptools
, which is really great.
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Alright, so next we need a version control system, for which mercurial
is
happily recommended in many tutorials, but I love my VCS and I am not going to
part away from it – I am loyal to it – Git
.
Finally, lets install virtualenv
which creates virtual isolated environments
for our Python projects, kinda like rvm
in Ruby world.
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Next, I do not want to run pip
command against the system python and overwrite
or update a needed library. So, I will tell pip
to only instally anything, if
we are in a virtualenv
based environment. Add the following two lines to your
~/.bashrc
, or zsh
configuration file (or, whatever else you use):
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Now, trying to install a package without a valid virtualenv
will give an error
that says:
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If you want to use pip
for the system based Python, you can add a function
like this in your bash/zsh configuration file:
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Create a new virtualenv, using:
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The Editor
Although, there is a really good PyCharm
editor available for Python, I will
still try and stay with my editor of choice: Vim
, which is really
magnificient. However, in the upcoming days, I can install and add various
python based features for my vim editor.
Epilogue
I have decided to write a separate blog post on what I find inside Python. Will soon write up about it.