As a final project for Week 5 of "Python For Everybody: 4," we had to work with an application that retrieves geographical data from a Google API for a list of locations, stores the data in a database, produces representations of the data in JSON, and then displays them visually in HTML -- a kind of home-made Google Maps.
I didn't have to write any of this code. All I had to do, really, was get an API key from Google and paste it into the code / HTML (because Google now requires API keys for JavaScript as well). That was the hard-way -- I could have kept the key variable False and just used a local version of the data. But as it is, I now have a Google API project called "Geodata-xxx" and two keys. Well, it isn't exactly Kingdom Hearts.
What I would like to do in the next few posts is make sure I understand the code I used. This is a point I've been thinking about since yesterday: the scariest thing whenever you have to write anything, code being no exception, is the blank page. Whether it's a mathematical proof, an essay, or a poem, you start with nothing except a vague idea of where you're going. It can feel humiliating to think that with all you learned, you can't even remember which import statement to use to get XML Trees. But what I realized, especially after watching this YouTube video, is that it doesn't matter.
I didn't have to write any of this code. All I had to do, really, was get an API key from Google and paste it into the code / HTML (because Google now requires API keys for JavaScript as well). That was the hard-way -- I could have kept the key variable False and just used a local version of the data. But as it is, I now have a Google API project called "Geodata-xxx" and two keys. Well, it isn't exactly Kingdom Hearts.
What I would like to do in the next few posts is make sure I understand the code I used. This is a point I've been thinking about since yesterday: the scariest thing whenever you have to write anything, code being no exception, is the blank page. Whether it's a mathematical proof, an essay, or a poem, you start with nothing except a vague idea of where you're going. It can feel humiliating to think that with all you learned, you can't even remember which import statement to use to get XML Trees. But what I realized, especially after watching this YouTube video, is that it doesn't matter.
Everything a person learns to do involves copying. You go through stages from copying with no understanding (pure rote) to copying with intelligence -- and eventually to copying, not from memory, but as it were from intelligence, copying what you know instead of what you see. It seems like this is true in music, where you start by playing a manuscript badly and end by interpreting it, as well as in analysis, where you learn to seamlessly interweave your own thoughts into a summary. It's even true in poetry, because most of a poet's beginning work is going to imitate what s/he encountered and admired in the writers who inspired h/er. Finding your voice is just owning the material.
Ever since reading books like Goedel, Escher, Bach or Darwin's Dangerous Idea, I've been really impressed with this idea: originality is just creative derivation. Nobody reinvents the wheel, and as a beginner, it's too easy to identify the machine with the people who have learned to maintain it. Intelligence and creativity exist, but they are a relation between master and context. The mistake is to reify, personify them in the master himself. And then you wonder how you'll ever make any progress at all. But the trick is to trust in the current to buoy you up and carry you where it's carried everyone else. This doesn't eliminate the possibility of failure -- but it makes success, with a little persistence, more likely.
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