Learning about Python and Twitterbots was both incredibly exciting and incredibly disappointing. Exciting I’ll get to, but since I’m from the Northeast, the more negative feeling usually surfaces first so I’ll start there.
Now, Matt and the workshop were both fantastic; it was a great job all around. What I mean by disappointing is that there was just SO MUCH I did not know and also did not know that I did not know. I mean, the Python training was pretty hard but I thought I had some handle (ableit fairly small) after doing it. After seeing some of the code (and what might be behind that code), though, and especially after seeing the possibilities of code and the errors that spit back and the ways to interpret the errors and the ways to search for solutions to errors and the eventual befuddlement at what any of those solutions searched for produced and the myriad available libraries and functions that I had difficulty parsing through for building a bot and all of the words that I thought were familiar to me but had no idea what they mean when used in regard to programming (initiating and returning and run and execute)…it’s all kind of exhausting and a tad disheartening.
Still, the sheer amount of possibilities such work holds is really cool. I’m not sure what I might do with this potentiality I have in front of me, but I was able to see how it worked (even if to a small degree) which helped me see some semblance of interesting things that could be an outcome from wielding code. Maybe I’m picking up on some of the procedural expressiveness inherent in such tools by physically doing some of this work in both Codecademy and in the workshop, which is very different from reading Bogost and saying “Yeah, I see that procedures can make arguments and expressions.” Doing it makes it real. And possible. Just don’t know a good how or why of that possible quite yet. I want to do some cool thing related to a research interest I have, but it hasn’t quite come to me yet. It’s out there, somewhere, though. Just need to go find it.
Despite my excitement/disappointment duality, there are things I can think about that were only very hazily apparent to me before I dug into Python and Twitter bots. That’s exciting. And probably exciting only because of this disappointment I seem to be expressing.
My boyfriend is a programmer. He is always saying things that hurt my head. Like, yesterday he was talking about RAM and processor memory and I was like, “well, I guess I don’t know anything about computers after all.” But we know more than we think we know. There’s just too much out there to know. Don’t be discouraged when you look out at the vast expanse of stuff that seems incomprehensible–be inspired! (This is mostly an inspirational post to keep me motivated. I just got a copy of Learn Python the Hard Way and cracked the cover, started reading the preface, said “nope,” and put it away…)
https://books.google.com/books/about/Learn_Python_the_Hard_Way.html?id=CfcEAQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false
Thanks, Haskell! I hope you make good progress with the book. I might check it out if you find it helpful. My post probably came off more negative than I intended. But I didn’t want to lose that negativity by putting my excitement in the foreground. I think with all of the information out there, and all of the potential it holds for work we can do, the sense of being overwhelmed is real. However, by all the work in Python and with the Twitterbots, that realness became real (by doing the thing), and that is very much inspiring and exciting.