Chapter 1 Diving into Life with Python

Intuitive Python — by David Muller (7 / 41)

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Eric could not stop laughing. We’d only just begun watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail and he was in stitches. Pretty soon the movie started catching me too, and I couldn’t help but laugh. For days afterward, we repeated our favorite gags — questioning each other about the airspeed velocity of unladen swallows and constantly yelling, “it’s just a flesh wound!”

In case you haven’t seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail, it’s a 1975 film by a surreal comedy troupe called Monty Python. Suffice to say, their movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail is absurd. Eric and I were only maybe eight or nine years old when we first saw it, which probably made the movie all the more hilarious to us.

Fast forward ten years later. I was in college learning to program, first with C, and then C++, and occasionally Java sprinkled in. For me, it was pretty much the opposite of laughing. I remember the torture of forgetting null terminators for C strings and never being able to exit vim (my text editor) cleanly.

After about two years programming in the dark, my friend Riley introduced me to programming in Python. I remember laughing not only at how easily I could write the programs I wanted to, but also at how easily I could read them back to myself later. Programming in Python…