are you sure python is a screwdriver? Its not the all new AI-driven Smart screwdriver that requires an account, wifi connection, and for you to input the name of your project before you can use it?
Yeah, it’s not about complexity things you can do with python, it’s the complexity of getting it to run. That continues to be the biggest pain point for me.
This is why I refuse to work in production code bases in python, it’s a nightmare of build systems, linters, package managers (dear god help the poor soul who accidentally pip’d from pypi and not your companies artifactory instance), formatters, convoluted ci pipelines that always seem to fail, a series of “senior” devs that will make you redo everything because you wrote your own map (we don’t use functional programming here meme) instead of a for loop (can’t use list comprehension for “code readability issues”). Got to the point of just saying fuck it, I’ll write it in Scala or rust, SBT and Cargo god tier.
Python is probably the language that popularized them, if not invented them. They’re saying the team doesn’t like using them.
My take is that other than C++, where it’s reasonable, forbidden language features are a smell for the team not having a healthy understanding of the language
As per all too often, the functional programming world invented them. Haskell (and its ilk) usually has all the future cool stuff already. Then python picks it up, then it moves over to C#/Java, then C++ says “mee too”!
Ha, you haven’t lived [in Hell] until you’ve tried to maintain a Jython build, with Python package dependencies (not just Java ones), in a production environment, in the 2020s.
I was doing a job interview and the manager asked me why I choose python over other languages like R, like if I tough that python was the best language or what? I answered that python is not the best language for anything, for any job you want there’s a better language, but python is the second best one for everything, so it offers a flexibility that no other language can. Like in my actuarial sciences MBA, all the professors use R, for 99% of they do I have an equivalent library in python, for the 1% that don’t I can use rpy2 and run R code directly in python. Guess they liked my answer because I was approved and I’m about to start there in October.
“python is the second best language for everything…”
I love that summation! Python has been key for me to learn programming concepts. I hope to move into other languages in the future, but for now, Python does everything I need it to.
Sure python may be easier to learn, but it makes learning actual programming more difficult. Ever since the CS department switched to python, my workload as a computer systems TA has doubled.
I learned Python after I already knew C, and I will forever be grateful for that.
I took an Operating Systems class in undergrad whose first assignment was to implement a simple web server in C, and it was fine. Later, I took the same prof’s grad-level class and had to do basically the same assignment again, and all I could think was “wow, this is incredibly tedious: this whole thing would be literally two lines of Python.” Python absolutely ruined my patience for writing C (or at least, for writing C socket code that has to manually juggle IPv4 and v6 struct addrinfos and whatnot).
shit I was planning on learning programming starting from python… so what now? I’ve got some high-school level microcontroller C memories, and I’m proficient with Ladder and simple Instruction List. I tend to learn by doing, that’s why I was going for Python, it felt like I could make something straight away.
Assuming we are not developing for Apple devices, it’s C# all the way for me. I haven’t touched another language that I would choose over it. The language is clear and functionally complete and all I suspect I will ever need for desktop application development.
Sidenote: I am fond of using JS for web dev, though the looseness of the syntax and the whole ‘objects are just arrays’ things make it hard to recommend for beginners
buy yourself a copy of K&R 2e (The C programming language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie). Its not only a good c book, but a great beginner programming book in general. If you’re a learn by doing guy, it has a lot of exercises you do.
i normally don’t learn by reading textsbooks myself, but this book proved an exception. its inexpensive too.
Everybody hating on Java being the de facto language every student learns first (at least back when I was in university) but I think it’s actually a great first language while I don’t think python is for one simple reason: it has types but tries to hide them from you. It is soooo important to understand types early though.
The main problem with Java (or garbage collected languages in general) as a first language is needing to unlearn the bad habits it ingrains when you move to a systems programming language with manual memory management. Other than that it’s a pretty good first language, though I’d suggest learning a bit of C at the same time just to get a basic grip on things like pointers and stack vs heap.
Edit: it occurs to me that C# would be the perfect learning language. It’s very similar to Java and an easy first language, but you’d also learn about stack allocation through structs, and can teach pointers using unsafe (though I think unsafe code is still GCed, so this wouldn’t help with the memory management side of things. Haven’t touched C# in fifteen years so I’m not sure how it works anymore).
Strictly-typed languages are the BEST for learning programming. I also like Java for it because there’s a difference between int and Integer (forcing you to learn about objects)
Java was my first language over ten years ago. I haven’t touched it in a decade (I’m mostly a hobbyist). I am grateful that I had to type all that shit out, and grateful that I don’t have to anymore (I’ve been using python since then).
I just recently helped a younger friend with their Java homework. I had to Google the syntax, but otherwise helped them ace it. I’ve mostly used Python since then, but learning java gave me such a good base of the fundamentals
“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.” — Edsger Dijkstra, 1975
But there’s been a good deal of programmers who have said that BASIC, and its ease of use and seeing almost instant results is extremely useful to not turn people off learning to code to begin with. Python is functionally the new BASIC in that regard, and while the language itself may not teach you to become an expert programmer, it may have gotten more people in the door than otherwise would have.
that may be true for CS and software development, but I think that has ended up being more harmful for other fields like electrical engineering. Kind of like how non STEM majors are too afraid to try engineering or sciences, because they all think calculus is this big scary incomprehensible thing that only einstein-level geniuses can learn. I’m seeing that same kind of fear preventing students from going into engineering because they don’t want to learn anything besides python.
I started using Python ~15 years ago. I didn’t go to school for CS.
Compared to using literally anything else at the time as a beginner, pip was the best thing out there that I could finally understand for getting third party code to work with my stuff, without copy paste… on Windows.
When I tried Linux, package managers and make were pretty cool for doing C/C++ work.
Despite all that, us “regular” engineers were consigned to Windows.
We either had to use VBA or a runtime that didn’t need to be installed.
But the Lord came down to see the city OS and the tower app the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking programming the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city OS. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
For how popular of a language python is, at this point it’s a bad sign to me that the language has default way to manage versions and create new projects. I get having options, but options are annoying to new folk.
One of the things that frustrated me more with python, coming from R and Julia, was that the math and statistics functions weren’t default. But after learning more, and learning the math, numpy, scipy and others started yo like that, there’s different projects working on the same and you pick and choose what works better for you.
Honestly also annoying as a not-so-new folk. I just thought about this yesterday, I reasonably expect to clone a random project from the internet written Java, Rust et al, and to be able to open it in my IDE and look at it.
Meanwhile, a Python project from two years ago that I helped to build, I do not expect to be able to reasonably view in an IDE at all. I remember, we gave up trying to fix all the supposedly missing dependencies at some point…
Are any of those things that you actually deal with as a beginner, though? Sure, those add complexities, but by the time you start to get into them, you are probably no longer a beginner.
Of course… But the idea is that it is misleading… And there’s more traps the beginners falls into. I have a feeling if beginners begin with C++, or other language that is strongly typed and requires memory management and then do some other language that is more abstract like python; they will become better programmers compared to them doing it in reverse.
Yeah but fuck all that python is good enough for most beginners. Variables, scope, loops, functions, operators… Once you get some of the principles down switching to C++ or similar isn’t nearly as bad.
Being a person that tried to learn C/C# from scratch in my early days python was a good gateway language.
I don’t know, man, far too many people seem to think that “easy to learn” means they’ll know all they need to know in relatively short time.
Like, you talk to our data scientists and they’ll tell you doing anything in Python, no problem. But you talk to our seasoned software engineers and you see the war flashbacks in their eyes, because it racks up in complexity so fucking quickly, it’s insane.
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