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(Disclaimer: Most of the content on IGUANALAND is satire.)
INTRO
For yet another of my classes this semester, the final project was to build a website from the ground up. It had to be a “Facebook variant”, with a similar structure but different topic of interest. For no reason at all, I chose Iguanas.
BUILD
We were limited to using original HTML (no CSS, JavaScript, HTML5, or prebuilt authoring tools) for the front end. The backend is done using CGI communications with scripts written in C, Perl, and Python. The course this website was created for is Software Systems, an intro course providing a basic overview of many of the commonly used programming languages.
The backend had to be created in three different languages to illustrate the pros and cons of each. After completion, the differences are abundantly clear. I recently came across an article matching common programming languages with Harry Potter characters, and let me say that C being paired with Voldemort is all too true.
I’d never worked with Perl or Python in the past. I was a huge fan of each. I very much liked the simplification of data types in Perl (into scalars, arrays, and hash tables), and thought that once the initial hump of unfamiliarity was overcome it was a very clean language for parsing and processing data.
When doing the Google syntax shuffle (the move where you Google piece by piece until you have enough of a working base in a language) for Python, one user’s comment on a StackOverflow question rang particularly true to me. User gotgenes said:
[Testing for NULL using “is not none”] is simply part of the Zen of Python: “Readability counts.” Good Python is often close to good pseudocode.
Looking back at my code, it almost is. Why hadn’t I ever used Python before?
TAKEAWAY
For a total of four days of programming with exclusively tools available 25 years ago, I’m pretty pleased with the result. The entire site is less than a thousand lines of code. Though it’s by no means a modern or secure website (there is absolutely no encryption or other security measures), building it was a solid introduction to the fundamentals of web development.
From this point, learning CSS, HTML5, or JavaScript should be quite smooth. If I find time over the summer, I’m going to use those tools to rebuild this site (gordonhart.co) and give it a sleek new front end.
Thanks for reading!
GH
Bits, Bots, and Miscellania 