I am in my 80s, and I write software as a hobby, largely for my own domestic purposes. Sharing my software, in the hope that it will be useful in some way to other people, has no contraindications as far as I can see, and it gives my work a wider meaning, I think.
I began my programming experience in the 1960s when I was a professional in the computer field (training) with a little of Honeywell mainframe Assembly language and COBOL, also writing machine language bootstrap routines and transferring them manually to punched cards in Hollerith code.
Years later, when microcomputers appeared on the market, I took up programming as a serious hobby, writing in Basic, VB(6), LiveCode, Rebol, Purebasic (with a little Spider), and finally in Javascript/JQuery. Until very recently, I had only ever dabbled a tiny bit in Python.
Now, at last, I have come to the famous Python for a better look! Here, you will find my first attempt at writing a serious program - the PY Spam Gobbler. Perhaps it was a little ambitious to begin with, but I was determined to produce something really useful from the very start. However, I almost bit off more than I could chew! Perhaps I was unlucky, because I came up against a few brick walls that apparently had no solution. Nevertheless, I managed to get around these problems using Rebol under WINE, and by re-starting the Python script when necessary. What I ended up with was a program that is certainly better than the original one I wrote many years ago, and to me at least, a pleasure to use on a daily basis. In addition to the Gobbler, I have re-written a few other less ambitious little programs in Python.
This new BobbyPY website is currently a little bit sparse, but if you also look at its "brother websites" - see the links on the front page - you might find other software of interest. The field of strictly necessary "domestic software" is not very great, unless you are a fanatical technician who thinks that everything should be automated and seeks to "educate" ordinary people into allowing their lives to become totally mechanized. As a "professional layman", that is not my aim at all. So if anything at all is added to this site in the future, it will hopefully facilitate the lives of its users and not complicate them.
