Question

In lecture 20 he mentions that the order of imports is important and he sent an email explaining it. Obviously we don't have access to that email, but can anyone explain why the order matters?

Answer 1

ie:
from pylab import *
import random, math

Answer 2

Because you're doing an import *. Don't do that.

imagine that pylab has it's own global name called random or math. If you put the

from pylab import * second you will overwrite the name random with the value from pylab rather than being the random module.

e.g.
e = 'e'
from math import *
print e

This is avoided by only importing exactly what you want from a module, or by just importing the module and not mucking up your namespace with another modules globals.

e.g.
e = 'e'
import math
print e
print math.e