I know you said not to write out the code but it's just easier to explain it this way. You don't need to use slots - they're for a specialised optimisation purpose (and if you don't know what it is, you don't need it).
class Person(object):
def __init__(self, name, gender, occurrences):
self.name = name
self.gender = gender
self.occurrences = occurrences
def main():
# read in the csv to create a list of Person objects
people = []
filename = 'yob' + input('Enter year: ') + '.txt'
for line in open(filename):
line = line.strip()
fields = line.split(',')
p = Person(fields[0], fields[1], int(fields[2]))
people.append(p)
# split into genders
p_m = [p for p in people if p.gender == 'M']
p_f = [p for p in people if p.gender == 'F']
# sort each by occurrences descending
p_m = sorted(p_m, key=lambda x: -x.occurrences)
p_f = sorted(p_f, key=lambda x: -x.occurrences)
# print out the first 20 of each
for p in p_m[:20]:
print p.name, p.gender, p.occurrences
for p in p_f[:20]:
print p.name, p.gender, p.occurrences
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()
I've used a couple of features here that might look a little scary, but they're easy enough once you get used to them (and you'll see them all over python code). List comprehensions give us an easy way of filtering our list of people into genders. lambda gives you an anonymous function. The [:20] syntax says, give me the first 20 elements of this list - refer to list slicing.
Your case is quite simple and you probably don't even really need the class / objects but it should give you an idea of how you use them. There's also a csv reading library in python that will help you out if the csvs are more complex (quoted fields etc).