In order to work on my latest task for GHOP, I need to do some coding in Python. I’m attempting to learn the language in under two days while I’m on vacation at the Dead Sea with limited internet access. So far, its gone (going?) surprisingly well.

I’m reading over Dive Into Python (a free book for programmers who are experienced with other languages) and I just got up to the following section on Python’s garbage collecting:

As a former philosophy major, it disturbs me to think that things disappear when no one is looking at them, but that’s exactly what happens in Python. In general, you can simply forget about memory management and let Python clean up after you.

The number of Linux users reading this blog has gone up lately (yippee!), so I’m pretty sure that I won’t be the only one to get a kick out of that.