At the time of writing this, I am only an hour into the Python tutorial and (I fear) rather far behind (so I’m taking a break to enter a post). I might have stared at the screen for so long trying to decipher the final lesson of “Tip Calculator” that the computer lab’s motion sensor lights went out on me. It turns out where I kept trying to enter number values, I was simply supposed to repeat the text (“meal + meal = etc.”). Duh. 

I am prone to overthinking and have cultivated an unfortunate learned helplessness in math (blame childhood rebellions against my math-enthusiast engineer father). This combination of traits makes this sort of activity especially fraught for me. Glancing at other posts, I take it I’m not the only one filled with (perhaps unnecessary) anxiety over this supposedly low-stakes exercise — to the extent that I’m stepping away from it to talk it out. This sort of blogging about my feelings is now giving me flashbacks to my middle school LiveJournal, so I’ll turn outwards to the second prompt of the entry: relevance to English studies.

Well, supposedly Python is named after Monty Python, who are some of my favorite Englishmen, but putting jokes aside, it’s a language, right? English studies is concerned with the art of language. In addition to being a language itself, the language that is used around Python (and other coding langues) are worth noting. Rhetoricians are certainly interested in discourse communities and disciplinary terminology, etc. (I, for one, always get so excited when I encounter the term “Boolean,” which may be a commonplace term for engineers but always feel novel to find in traditional English studies). This feels like another Duh sort of answer, but I will use this as a placeholder and perhaps update more thoughtfully when I finish my full two-hour foray and also take a nap.

(In the meantime, via clearly trusty fact-checking on Wikipedia, I’ve found an appropriate bird anecdote: “Additionally, a 2001 April Fool’s Day joke by van Rossum and Larry Wall involving the merger of Python with Perl was dubbed “Parrot” after the Dead Parrot sketch. The name “Parrot” was later used for a project to develop a virtual machine for running bytecode for interpreted languages such as Perl and Python.”)