I’m a retired Unix sysadmin. Over the years I’ve built things in COBOL, FORTAN, C, perl, rexx, PHP, visual basic, various Unix shells and maybe others. Nothing has been a real “application” - mostly just utilities to help me get things done.
Now that I’m retired, and it’s cold outside, I’m curious to try some more coding - and I have an idea.
The music communities here seem to post links to YouTube. I generally use Lemmy on my phone but don’t use YouTube, or listen to music, on my phone if I can help it. I’d like to scrape a music community here and add the songs posted to a playlist in my musicbrainz account.
Does that sound like a reasonable learner project? Any suggestions for language and libraries appreciated. My preferred IDE is vim on bash and I have a home server running Linux where this could run as a daemon, or be scheduled.
I find Python difficult - no idea why, it just doesn’t feel right. I’ve tried a few times but never been able to do anything useful with it - that’s why it’s not in my list above. It does seem though that my proposed project, and development “style”, is best suited to Python. Maybe it’s time to try again.
It was just a recommendation. If you feel like python isn’t for you, you can try any other language and the only difference will be how much time it’ll take to make it, but otherwise you can use C if you want. Maybe you’re so used to low level programming like managing memory and having to declare types everywhere that python dumb proof approach is difficult for you. Just don’t think too hard about it, if it’s a personal use script then there’s no need to think about it’s efficiency or ugliness. If it works, it works.
Python is basically runnable pseudo code that you would write on a napkin to explain stuff to somebody. There you don’t care about curly backets and naturally indent to show scope. It’s way simpler C and if you want to, you can add type hints (aka faux static typing).
Package management is done with pip although nowadays poetry is better as it uses one file to define everything about your project and configure the tools (linter, tester, autoformatter, static type checking)
The advantage of python is that it has lots and lots of libraries. You don’t need to fiddle around with the lemmy API - use a library:
- https://pypi.org/project/pylemmy/ - slightly newer
- https://pypi.org/project/Lemmy.py/ - looks abandoned but might suit your needs
Want to connect to musicbrainz? https://pypi.org/project/musicbrainzngs/ is probably the best.
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Create a virtual env (basically allows you to install all your project dependencies in an environment separate from the global one): python3 -m venv .venv.
Activate the virtual in your shell source .venv/bin/activate.
Now you can start installing dependencies. If you want it super simple, use pip install $package, but updating the list of packages you want in your project is manual: pip freeze > requirements.txt (install them again with pip install -r requirements.txt after rm -rf .venv should you want to start fresh) and you can run into problems with clashing dependencies.
So, I recommend using poetry pip install poetry. poetry new . to setup basic project structure, then add runtime dependencies with poetry add $package e.g poetry add pylemmy musicbrainzngs.
It’s possible to add dev dependencies with poetry like ruff for linting and autoformatting your code and mypy for static type checking. Your unit tests can be written using unittest from the standard library.
Thank you for your detailed response. It’s a bit much for my proposed “project”. I won’t be using any libraries (other than built-in python json etc.). I’ve prototyped most of it and it’s currently about 15 lines of code. Literally one call to lemmy, a search to Musicbrainz and a playlist update to listenbrainz. I know it will grow lots as I make it a bit more robust, but it’s still very small.
