So far in this series we set up the terminal and Homebrew , then installed Python with asdf and gave each project its own virtual environment . Now we need a place to actually write code. This is the one area where the book and I mostly agree, so this post is less about replacing its advice and more about finishing the job it starts. ...
In the last post we set up the foundation: the terminal, the Command Line Tools, Homebrew, and a ~/projects folder for your code. No Python yet. This post installs it, and it’s where this series makes its first real departure from the book. Python Crash Course has you download Python from python.org and double-click an installer. That works, and if you’ve already done it, nothing here is going to break it. But it leaves you with a single Python wired into your whole machine, and no clean way to keep one project’s libraries from leaking into another. We’re going to install Python so that you control which version you’re running and so that every project gets its own isolated set of packages. It’s two tools doing two jobs, and once it’s in place you stop thinking about it. ...
I bought my dad a MacBook Air for Father’s Day. He joined Sun Microsystems in 1990 and spent two decades there writing Java, at the company that invented it, then moved to Oracle when it bought Sun in 2010. He retired in the summer of 2022. Thirty-two years, and he hasn’t really opened a computer since. The plan is to get him back into it with Python, using Eric Matthes’ Python Crash Course , which is the book I’d hand anyone starting today. There’s a small joke buried in that. Python Crash Course opens with a dedication: “For my father, who always made time to answer my questions about programming.” I’m running it backwards. ...