2021-02-22, MONDAY
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Monday's aren't so bad when we finally get some warm weather! 

It was a beautiful day in North Texas today as the sun came out 
and temperatures warmed up to the 70's.  What a difference from 
the blizzard and bitter cold we experienced last week! I ventured
off property for the first time in a week.  I had a few errands to 
run and I spent some time at my office meeting with clients.  
I enjoyed getting out of the house.  

From BASIC to PYTHON?

Yesterday, I spent some time learning very rudimentary Python programming.
I have been writing some simple BASIC programs on my Commodore 64 and
I got the idea to try to port a program from BASIC to Python. Part of
what inspired me to do this was my Chromebook.  I've had a Samsung Plus
Chromebook for a couple of years, but it hasn't seen much use in a while.
I read an article that said that Chromebooks were actually outselling 
Mac Computers.  Could that be mostly because of the education market 
and remote schooling?  I'm not sure, but, anyway, I thought I would get 
my Chromebook out and updated and give it a whirl.

When I updated to the latest Beta channel on my Chromebook, I saw that 
there was the option to install a Beta linux distribution as part of 
the Chromebook install.  Unlike other processes that boot the entire 
device into Linux, this acts more like a VM and opens the linux terminal
in a window inside the running Chrome OS environment. So, it is possible
to run the Chrome browser, Android apps, and Linux at the same time.
The Linux distro is Debian Buster.

So having installed Linux on the Chromebook, I got the idea to try
Python.  I don't know anything about Python and I'm not exactly a BASIC
expert either, but I looked at some tutorials and was able to figure out
how to port a simple accounting program I wrote in BASIC into Python.
It was actually fun. Conceptually, the biggest hurdle was understanding
how to get the program to point to different subroutines without a GOTO
or GOSUB command that are staples in BASIC.  I figured out I could define
functions as subroutines and call them from a menu.  I also had to learn
how Python works with lists instead of arrays and I had to learn how to 
read and write to sequential text files to store and retrieve data. I 
felt like I accomplished a lot in a short time period and I look forward 
to learning some more Python.

So that's all I got at the moment. Hope you are warm and safe and not 
floating around on soggy sofa cushions inside your house.  TTFN