Devoted though I am to the joy of watching a SUT I'm targeting go smash ... building things is fun too, and building Hammer and sipp scripts is just not very interesting any more, as it's been a long time since I needed to do anything challenging with either of them.  (That could change any time for sipp, but so far it hasn't.)

So I've decided that I ought to work on my long-neglected programming skills.  I took a discarded laptop from the junk pile at work (offered to pay for it, which offer was declined), put Ubuntu Lucid Lynx on it, put some more memory in it, bought a couple of Python books, and started getting acquainted with Python.

Discoveries so far:

Four and a half years of working in a Windows shop have degraded my Unix command-line skills, though I find that my fingers on the keys remember more than my conscious mind does.  It's coming back ...

I'm still getting used to its idioms, but already I like Python a lot.  Not surprising, since it can be used either for functional or object-oriented programming, and though I've never done object-oriented before (1) Modula-2 is sort of halfway there, it has information hiding but not inheritance, and I was on the losing side of the C versus Modula-2 holy war and (2) in the early 90s I did a 1-day tutorial at a testing conference, meant to explain object-oriented programming concepts to testers, and by the midmorning break I was going "oh, it's frame theory, that's pretty cool".  I was taught about frame theory when I was studying Artificial Intelligence as an MIT undergraduate, and at the time I thought it was interesting but had no idea it was going to turn out to be practical.  (But I don't think that long-ago problem set counts as having done object-oriented programming.)

Programming tools have improved a lot since I was a developer.  Python offers a lot of modules to provide functions I would have had to write myself back then, and editing code with an IDE is much easier than using vi for that purpose.

Fun!