For me, Python is just for fun. Part of the fun is just the joy of learning. Part of the fun, at the age of 70, is reinforcing my mental acuity. And part of the fun is organizing information in ways that others can use to help them understand something. This is an odd and fairly unique skill that I have been told repeatedly, in many different contexts, that I have at least in some small measure. It is literally a difference in the way I perceive reality. Hence Big Daddy’s toolboxes now downloaded many thousands of times – always for free – from GitHub.

So looking for my next direction of study or effort a number of ideas and projects are in various stages of gestation. I started a funny personality test with just 12 questions loosely based on the Marston model which I have a hunch will be surprisingly accurate while being entertaining and providing demo opportunities for the use of the canvas widget in tkinter.

That one got pushed aside by a grandson-inspired text-adventure idea heavily using classes (monsters, rooms, weapons – they are all classed objects) and functions (battle, decision making, conversation, etc.) to create a heavily customizable program for creating a program that would be a text adventure. The first adventure would star a Hispanic young man who has to negotiate a high school at night to retrieve his homework assignments – its working title is “Ready Player Juan”. But I got far enough into that one to realize it would be literally months of work – not sure I have the attention span.

Before I get back into the Raspberry Pi, I think I really need to learn a lot more about threading and multiprocessing. Those subjects are so complex I have been looking at taking courses at a local college in the Atlanta area. One of my “maker ideas” (so secret I dare not give clues) requires those skills but seems to be stymied by something in Python called GIL – global interpreter lock…but apparently there are ways to get around it. See an excellent overview of GIL at Understanding the Python GIL

There are lots of other “little” ideas, but very recently it came to my attention that nobody has produced a serious/successful attempt to publish something on emulating Excel formulas with Python functions. At least not that I could find. There is a single unfinished and undocumented module in the Cheese Shop. Mostly this is just math in the same sense that building the Great Wall of China was just brick-laying. So I am thinking this is an extensible project. I could do the highlights, then over a long, period of time, taking on the more difficult and demanding functions. I’m betting I get the basics posted. Time will tell.