Baby Steps with Python

Thanks to the enthusiasm I’ve returned from EuroPython with (and the fact I couldn’t make it to OpenTech because of washing machine issues) I decided to spend a little bit of time porting Nagios Webchecks to python. As a use case it covers a lot of the functionality I need in my day to day system scripts. The ability to specify command line arguments, read a config file and interpolate a template file for output.

I’m no where near finished (and I need to spend a lot more time with Python in a Nutshell before I’m going to feel comfortable) but there’s been nothing too horrible so far. Libraries returning tuples rather than lists still feels a little awkward but I suspect that’s just me being new to this. ConfigParser seems to meet my current ini file reading needs (which are pretty simple) and Jinja2 looks like a decent template engine. Biggest personal bugbear so far is that using % when printing a variable feels wrong ( print "Hello %s", name feels a lot more comfortable than print "Hello %s" % name and is a more common format across languages.)

I’ll show the code to a co-worker or two on Monday and hopefully pickup some constructive criticism as they destroy my slightly too perlish attempt at python code.