Some programming
I finally took a break to do some programming for fun. I put together some Python programs to fetch weather observations (METAR) and forecasts, extract the parts I wanted, and put them into the background window dashboard of "conky". Conky is similar to the Windows "rainmeter" tool. It can put various useful status stuff into a semi-transparent window in the background wallpaper. The other excuse was preparing to help my nephew who is going to be taking an intro course on programming, and Python is the chosen first language.
Now that I've used it a bit I agree it makes a good first language. All the important basic concepts are there, it's got a huge library of useful parts, it's widely available, and it's a simple syntax. For example, there is a large library of meteorology tooling. I could get an open source METAR decoder, so getting the current observation consisted of fetching the METAR (a few lines to do HTTP GET), invoking the METAR decoder to get a complex object, then selecting and formatting the observation fields that I wanted displayed.
End result looks like this:
Now that I've used it a bit I agree it makes a good first language. All the important basic concepts are there, it's got a huge library of useful parts, it's widely available, and it's a simple syntax. For example, there is a large library of meteorology tooling. I could get an open source METAR decoder, so getting the current observation consisted of fetching the METAR (a few lines to do HTTP GET), invoking the METAR decoder to get a complex object, then selecting and formatting the observation fields that I wanted displayed.
End result looks like this: