Python

In this column I’m going to get a little bit technical. To some of you this column will feel like you are trying to swim across the Atlantic Ocean, while others will consider this just a dip in the kiddie pool.

One reader sent me a version of Magic that worked remarkably well. You play against another player over the Internet. It has 80 cards and even includes complex cards like Goblin Sharpshooter (untaps when a creature goes into the graveyard) and Doran, the Siege Tower (assigns combat damage according to toughness).

I checked out the card code and it was short and elegant, it is 100% times better than the way that I currently program cards. The language that he chose was Python. Python is often related to Perl and is sort of a duct-tape, do-anything type of language. Python lets you do slick tricks like having an array of methods. (Yes you can do that in other languages, but Python makes it easy.)

Python, like many scripting languages, is a loosely typed. That means that an object can hold a string, integer, function, method or a class. You don’t have to declare an objects type. In Python you would write “a = 10” and in other languages you would write “int a = 10”, see the difference? C, C++, Java, and many others are strongly-typed languages, an int is always int, it cannot be anything else. Python also doesn’t use semicolons which I find refreshing.

The implementation of Doran, the Siege Tower was especially short considering that it does something very complicated. In the Python, Doran replaces the method for combat damage. It sounds simple, but that is very hard, if not impossible, to do in other languages. This way of programming Doran is powerful because the combat code doesn’t need to know about Doran and yet Doran and still affect combat.

If I had to currently program Doran, the combat code would have to check if Doran was in play. This way of programming is adequate but the combat code can get very messy with a large number of cards. The Python way of programming Doran didn’t change the combat source code at all so the combat code could still be simple and easy to read.

I am just starting to learn Python but it isn’t perfect. There are no private variables which strikes me as very peculiar. There are no interfaces, empty classes with only method signatures, like there are in Java and C#.

All things considered, I like Python better than Java and I plan to use Python in my future programming projects. Currently I feel like I’m programming on ice when I use Python because I am so familiar with Java. Python still feels slippery to me, but in time I will get used to it. I believe that Python’s fast-and-easy feel is immensely flexible and powerful.

I am also intrigued by Python’s claims of shorter code versus Java. Shorter code to me means less debugging (there are fewer lines of code that could be buggy) and less writing time (which means I can write more in the same amount of time). And although I have enjoyed my marathon sessions of 4 hours of programming just to add 12 new cards, I would like to be a little more efficient. Hopefully Python will enable me to actually write code that other people can understand instead of the messy code that currently inhabits MTG Forge.

If you actually made it to the end of this column, you are doing pretty good. :) What other blog talks about Doran, the Siege Tower and loosely typed programming languages?