This week was great! I continued working with PyQt, making small graphical applications, from Monday until Friday. PyQt, as said in my last blog, is a massive graphics library that makes creating visual app elements far easier. This week I made apps with custom signals and slots, these are hard to describe without an example but are basically things that when acted upon (clicked) send out a signal to a function that does something. This is super interesting because every app that we use every day operates with these signals and slots. Designing small applications also made me realize the grand scale of apps we use everyday because it was so time consuming just to do the small ones.
On Friday we were introduced to SWIG, a Python wrapper for using other languages. This is a very complex idea because to understand why a wrapper is needed you have to understand the differences in how the computer reads code from languages like C and C++ vs other languages like Python and Java. C and C++ are very basic languages with very little abstraction so for the person they seem really convoluted, however for the computer they are really easy to read. The opposite is true for Python, where for the user it is really easy to read, but for the computer it has to be translated. This difference is massive in the speed at which programs run. SWIG comes in handy when you need the speed of C or C++ but don’t want to write the whole application in those languages. SWIG makes the Python code be able to access functions written in C or C++. This can make a huge difference when doing recursion or array sorting. On Friday we also had a meeting introducing us to our final project and all of its requirements, we haven’t started that yet though so I’ll save it for another week.
My pictures are of a super interesting SWIG example for using a C function to calculate the best dates for Earth to Mars space travel, and the second is of the outside of the building I work in!
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