Re: [pygame] learning pygame: what to focus for a board game?

[Laura Creighton <lac@xxxxxxxxxx>]

<snip>

Thank you for your kind words,

>Ah, design patterns! Being not a professional programmer (I'm actually a
>biophysics ph.d. student) they always escaped me -I tried to have a look
>at them but I didn't understand a lot of them. Not that I looked very
>thoroughly. I'll surely dig it. Thanks a lot.

MVC is a pattern, but not a design pattern.  One problem that all
my students have is that the original Design Patterns book is not
written with 'explain this to people who are new at this' in mind.
Its the distillation of decades of experience with very thorny
problems.  If you know the problems, you will go 'Aha! So _that's_
what I ought to have ...'.  But if you have never had the problem,
you will just scratch your head, and go 'huh'?

Also, a whole lot of what they explain makes only sense for C++, or
some other statically typed language.  If you can get a copy of 
'the Design Patterns Smalltalk Companion' - which is likely available
at your CSC library -- and read it and Design Patterns hand-and-hand
you will find it a lot easier going.  It doesn't matter if you do
not speak Smalltalk, and that the Smalltalk syntax truly is weird --
the Smalltalk way of doing things is usually pretty much the same
way we would do it in Python, and nowhere at all like the way you
would implement something in C++.

The Smalltalk companion is also much better at explaining the part that
is the _pattern_ , without mixing it up with the part that is 'how to 
bash C++ over the head with a stick to make it implement a pattern'.  

>Well, I'll do my better. My spare time is what it is, but as soon I have
>some code, I'll put it online for people to help me.

Sounds great.

>By the way: Luke P. adviced me about using Google Code to host the
>project. What do you think about?

I've never used Google Code, but Sourceforge these days is painfully
slow.  And sometimes stops accepting ssh connections for hours at
a time.  I get the impression that sometimes this is because everbody
has to wait until some American wakes up and gets to the office, but
I'm generally in a pretty bad mood by that time, and perhaps am
imagining things.

Laura

>
>m.