The “Invent with Python” Blog

Jeff Atwood wrote a post on his Coding Horror blog entitled “Please Don’t Learn to Code” in which he rails against the idea that “everyone should learn programming”.

And I couldn’t agree more.

People, not everyone needs to learn programming. Only some gifted individuals (of which we professional software developers are included) need to learn programming. For the rest of you, unless you are srsly committed it will just be a meaningless chore that may damage your tiny brains.

Coding is just like surgery: if an amateur decides to code their own Angry Birds clone as a fun little project, people will literally die. Those are the stakes, folks. That’s why it should be left to those who are explicitly pursing it as a professional career.

TL; DR link

You have my assurance that I find Bloomberg’s encouragement of people to learn a technical skill personally offensive. It filled me with a rage that was only subdued after discouraging a small child from learning to play the harmonica. (What’s the kid going to do with that skill anyway? There are better ways he could spend his valuable time.)

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This post goes into the details of how you can add a “save game” feature to your games. Python’s built-in shelve module makes this very easy to do, but there are some pitfalls and tips that you might want to learn from this post before trying to code it up yourself.

To give an example of adding a “save game” feature to a game program, I’ll be taking the Flippy program (an Othello clone) from Chapter 10 of “Making Games with Python & Pygame” (and Reversi from Chapter 15 of “Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python”.)

If you want to skip ahead and see the Flippy version with the “save game” feature added, you can download the source code and image files used by the game. You need Pygame installed to run Flippy (but not Reversi).
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