I would recommend not rejecting programming languages for aesthetic reasons. Each one has its advantages and disadvantages and it is in one's interest to respect those when choosing a language for any particular project.
@0celóñe7 With xcolor, you can define both RGB colors and CMYK colors for the same name --- probably useful if you're planning to have your poster printed.
That's not really the point though, is it? The original statement is that python is a scripting language and not a programming language. We're now translating that to a new sentence: "Python is a good interpreted language, but not a good compiled one".
@0celóñe7 It would be close. But if the image file and your LaTeX orange came out of the printer slightly differently, it'd probably be because one specifies both RGB and CMYK while the other specifies one and relies on the printer to compute the other.
@0celóñe7 Monitors use an additive color scheme - RGB, starting from black and adding the three colors - while printers must use a subtractive color scheme CMYK: Starting from white and adding three colors (cyan, magenta, yellow) as well as black (called "key" for reasons unknown to me)
@DanielSank So, 'Python is a good interpreted language. I don't like it because I don't like having to use interpreted languages as they're slower than compiled ones and they offer less fine control over the less abstract processes'
A lot of what I do in python calls into compiled C libs. It's as fast as it needs to be.
Another thing that must be considered in choosing a language is how long you want to spend in development of your project, and how many bugs you'll have.
Compare C and Python in terms of security: In C, it's pretty easy to put buffer overflows into your program. In Python it's damned near impossible.
If I don't need the performance of C, I'll happily use python so that I can get the work done more correctly and more quickly.
@DanielSank For a lot of people, this is definitely true. I like the idea of being able to improve code to make it run faster at a more fundamental level so it's as efficient as possible
@DanielSank The converse of this is that I can run garbage collection myself so that in programs where exact timing (e.g. nuclear power plants, not that I've ever needed to worry about that) matter, it's better controlled in C/C++
Yes, one should not ever use python in a program needing precise timing, but you also shouldn't use any standard operating system in such a case either!
Essentially, I think that all the issues I have with python stem from a small amount of time doing computer science, which worries about completely different things to programming in physics, or even programming in general
It's the little things: not as fast, not as good at parallelisation, I prefer more lower level control, I like to do my own garbage collection [in programming!], I don't like that it forces you to use whitespace in a particular way (when there are other, just as valid methods)
@0celóñe7 Hmmm, no, my faculty page seems to have work email only. Gmail identifier is my full name as spelled on my faculty page (dots are irrelevant).
@DanielSank This is the thing: all code should be readable - if it's not, it's not good code. Python forces one particular 'type' of whitespace, there are other 'types' of whitespace that are also good and that alone doesn't make good code, although I do get that it would be a good way to learn that whitespace is important
no, more than that - you said you started your PhD 11 months ago, i.e. in 2016, so i'm looking at the 2016 cohort. further, i looked at those in that group who graduated from Bristol and are male.
@0celóñe7 Mithrandir used a sentence of the form "I did such-and-such and such-and-such at Bristol" making it sound like the at Bristol applied to the whole thing.
@Mithrandir24601 So, I switched to python when I realized that more than 99% of my programming time was spent writing the program, rather than waiting for the computation to run.
@dmckee Just one thing now. I'm writing a poster but don't want two lines for authors like in the templates the school gave me. Is one line: My Name, Professor (Faculty Advisor) ok?
I love python as a starter language for several reasons, but I also think it provides too much protection from hairy internals for someone to have 'learned to program' if they only speak python.
@dmckee Fair enough I suppose - my first experience with python was a few years after learning to program, at which point I just looked at it and went 'no'
So I'm not the best person to ask about learning programming using python
@rob also please keep a look out for where the title color is set. I want to change it to dark gray, that dark blue isn't right (I can't find the setting)
@Mithrandir24601 I learned to program decades ago, but I have used it as the language for a 'one weekend crunch course on the minimum you need to know'.
@ACuriousMind From the government website: "if you’re 16 or 17 and accompanied by an adult, you can drink (but not buy) beer, wine or cider with a meal"
@rob Duck typing is fine, but not actually having type info in the language can be a huge pain. Imagine refactoring a large chunk of Python. How do you have any idea that you did it right without types to help you?
You only find out about mistakes in Python at runtime. This is really fantastically annoying.
I wrote several C++ programs where I had classes with similar interfaces that might should do the same thing, but there wasn't a logical reason for them to inherit from each other. Templating sort-of does this for C++, but it has its own issues.
@DanielSank I've had that problem bite me. It's especially annoying when the typo is in some method that doesn't get called until late in a longish computation.
@heather Well, imagine that instead of x=5 is a step that takes ten minutes to run, and that throwing the exception erases your newly-found value of x.
@DanielSank I'm uploading the video files, although it'll supposedly take 15 hours... If it's not done (or nearly done) by when I'm up in the morning, I'll try uploading it from work. With that, I'm off to bed - night all!
@0celóñe7 It's the \setbeamercolor lines in main.tex that do it. I'm having trouble defining colors, though ... I think there's some mismatch between my LaTeX documentation and overleaf's LaTeX.
@rob No, those are for some parts, like the box colors. Font color should be controlled by the beamerthemeconfposter.sty file. I managed to change the title color there
