Laziness (and Python)

I wrote enough last time to scare some of you about serial communication. I was going to write about the design of a simple serial messaging protocol to make all of you readers feel better, but my laziness got to me. I mean, it's all designed in my head, but I figured I'd need tables and diagrams and figures and such to really explain it well. That riled up my innate laziness, so I decided to write about that instead.

To put this in some perspective, I am supposed to be the library maintainer for TinyCAD. It's an open-source schematic capture program, and development on it just started again after a few years of languishing. My duties are to put together libraries of basic schematic symbols (resistors, capacitors, diodes, some ICs, etc) for other people to use.

I'm not doing a good job. I have released no libraries yet.

I do admit - I'm lazy. And this job requires a fair bit of tedious work. The libraries are stored in Microsoft JET database format and the symbols can only be edited with TinyCAD's built-in drawing tools. They're OK, but not if you want to make two dozen symbols at once. Or worse yet, make slight changes to two dozen symbols at once. Or just add a bunch of meta-data (part name, manufacturer, part number, etc). You have to create all the fields for every part, edit them manually, save, etc etc. The entire process was not made for batch creation and editing. I was in danger of getting absolutely no work done at all. Or worse yet, I was in danger of doing lots of tedious work and then re-doing it when I needed to make slight changes to every part I had already made. Something that realistically I should only have to do once and then forget about it.

I am no fan of manual operations, especially when they are tedious and repetitive. Humans are not geared towards that sort of work - we make more mistakes and are much less efficient than a small shell script. When I was making wirelists my brain would just shut off after a while and I would do all sorts of really wrong things. Or I would cut and paste things that shouldn't be cut and pasted because although I thought two things were the same they weren't. My wirelist had tons of errors that luckily weren't too expensive to fix. But the lesson is clear - don't use people for repetitive operations. They're bad at it.

So when I was faced with the prospect of doing just that for these libraries I said 'no' and started immediately with the laziness. Laziness is bad of course because it keeps you from getting work done. And since I wasn't required by force of law or paycheck to make these libraries I wasn't too insistent on starting a process I knew would be frustrating and error-prone. I did nothing until I learned about Python.

Python is a scripting language that is designed to be easy and do everything. It is very close to succeeding. As I said before these symbol libraries were made with Microsoft Jet Database. It's the back end of Microsoft Access. I am not entirely impressed with Microsoft products but I knew SQL queries and it supports those so I had some baseline. And I had Python. A little searching and I figured out which module I had to import to allow access to the database. A little more searching and I figured out how I could insert the BLOB (Binary Long OBject, or maybe Binary Large OBject? - it's how raw data is stored in fields in databases) for the symbol drawings. Then I said to myself, why don't I store the symbol text data in a CSV file so I can just type things out once? Python has an import for that too. TinyCAD can export the parts data as XML? Great, I can import DOM to access the XML and create a CSV out of the current libraries.

If you've ever used Matlab scripting you'll feel right at home. Heck, there's even SciPy - it mimics many of the functions of Matlab (graphic, matrix operations, basic math, etc) in case you're too poor to buy Matlab. You can use wxWidgets or any other GUI library to create GUI apps. You can access almost any database. You can draw with TKInter. You could lose your voice from listing all the things you can do. It's easy, comprehensive and powerful.

Python gave me a reason for my laziness. I can do more work, more accurately and faster than if I had tried to do everything by hand. Bottom line: if you're avoiding doing some tedious work, pick up Python or any scripting language and do yourself a favor by making a tool to do the work for you. You'll thank me.