Hobbyist - Python vs. other languages



I have been playing with computers since I first learned to program
moving shapes on an Atari 800XL in BASIC. After many years of dabbling
in programming languages as a hobbyist (I am not a computer scientist
or other IT professional), I have never found a way to stick with a
language far enough to do anything useful. I learn all about loops
and data structures and functions/methods etc. but never get to create
a program that will do anything of value that I can't more easily do
via freeware. Well, except the slot car timing system I wrote in C++
for Linux many moons ago.

Honestly Python seems like a breath of fresh air and possibly a way to
get back to my BASIC roots, you know, programming just for the fun of
it.

Since I don't have a specific problem to solve, besides
Pythonchallenge (which I found very cryptic), and Project Euler (which
I found beyond my mathematics skills), is there a place to go for
increasingly difficult problems to solve? I have followed a number of
the recommended online tutorials that contain a logical progression of
problems and yet they all end at the point where a person has enough
knowledge of the syntax, but not really enough to do anything.
.



Relevant Pages

  • Re: Hobbyist - Python vs. other languages
    ... After many years of dabbling ... in programming languages as a hobbyist (I am not a computer scientist ... Honestly Python seems like a breath of fresh air and possibly a way to ...
    (comp.lang.python)
  • Re: consciousness
    ... computers are faced with unexpected conditions all the time. ... great deal of effort in most modern programming languages is to deal ... I suspect you are correct, which is why I suspect real AI ... an emergent property of complexity. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Beginning ANSI - Standard C
    ... computer games for the 8-bit computers and the 16-bit computers such ... I have got the following books: ... Which ANSI C compiler is GOOD, ...
    (comp.lang.c)
  • Re: Next generation COBOL?
    ... Immediate problems aside, what COULD quantum computers potentially do for us better than conventional computers? ... algorithms which do not deal with QuBits. ... A problem not shared by programming languages. ...
    (comp.lang.cobol)
  • SiMPLE Programming for Everyone!
    ... the first "hobby computers" started appearing in ... Apple Computer. ... programming languages started becoming more and more esoteric ... development system that would be as easy to use as Applesoft BASIC had ...
    (comp.programming)