False friends and Picasa web movies

Yesterday I tried out Python for real, applied to a problem I have with Picasa's web page generator.

What problem? For movie files, Picasa generates an embedded Windows Media Player control that does nothing. This is easily fixed by substituting this simple embed link:

<embed src="movie-filename" width="320" height="256" />

It was an interesting, refreshing experience to write in a new language, bringing to it expectations and baggage from Perl, Scheme, ML, and Mathematica. It was a process of "how do I read command line argument?", "now how do open a file?", and "what about creating an empty list?" I could bring my assumptions about the language semantics and capabilities and ask "how do I..." over and over.

A little like learning one Romance language after knowing two or three others, yes?

I spent most of my time consulting the Quick Reference and occasionally to the full Library Reference, with a boost from Introduction to Python/Hello World! to get started.

The things that gave me the most frustration in writing my 89 line script were definitely novice mistakes. If your critical attention is on a piece of code and you say "hey, that's not right!" it's a step up from the novice who doesn't realize something is out of place.

Mistake #1: Using parens to surround list literals: list = (). Not sure where I picked this up. Just as in SML, my native language, Python lists are surrounded by square brackets: [], [1,2,3],["and","so","on"]. Parentheses surround tuples, which are fixed-length. Since Python uses dynamic types, I could write list = () and nothing bad ever happened to me until I tried to append something to it. The error message finally clued me in on what type my variable was.

Mistake #2: Using comma instead of colon in a slice. I had written an expression like line[i+1,j]. Again, not sure why my fingers glibly typed the comma. The error was TypeError: string indices must be integers. That communicated to me that a substring, which is what I meant, could only be done with literal integers, not with integer-valued expressions. Spent a bunch of time in the documentation for other ways to get a substring before figuring out I had a comma when I needed a colon: line[i+1:j]. I think a non-novice Python programmer would have spotted the mistake immediately.

I explained all this to my linguistically-minded wife, someone who actually does speak multiple languages, and she thought it sounded like I had made the "false friends" mistake. I used something with a meaning in one language, and instead of being gibberish in the current language meant something else. Something related enough to cause confusion for a while.

These trivial problems were fixed, and the fixpicasamovies.py script worked great.