• toastal@lemmy.ml
    212·
    2 days ago

    This is so true & unfortunately everyone keeps telling beginners to start at Python

  • jeffhykin@lemm.ee
    1081·
    3 days ago

    I didnt upvote the other python-beginer friendly meme cause it wasn’t accurate. But this one is on point.

  • heavy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    882·
    2 days ago

    I don’t know who needs to hear this, but Python, like most languages, can be as complex as you make it.

  • powermaker450@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    17·
    2 days ago

    oh my fuck. circular imports.

    I set out to create a Discord Bot in Python, then gave up trying to use an easy “proper” server-side language and just did it in TypeScript

  • Machindo@lemmy.ml
    56·
    2 days ago

    Some people in the comments didn’t take it as tongue-in-cheek as I did. 😝

    I thought this was really funny. That’s a good collection of toe stubs.

    There is a lot of stuff to learn to be good at python but I still love it.

  • dudinax@programming.dev
    595·
    2 days ago

    Best scientific packages in the open source by far, a library for everything, everybody knows it. Works on all kinds of systems. Available by default in many OSs.

    You might not like it, but you can’t leave.

    • azimir@lemmy.ml
      422·
      2 days ago

      The summary that I liked from the last post was “python is the second best language for everything”. There’s always something specialized and better for every given job. But, if you want one tool that’ll do a solid job everywhere, python is your go to.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
        3·
        21 hours ago

        I don’t think that’s quite right. It’s more like if you have to choose a language before you know what you’re doing, Python is the best choice. For anything large enough it’s multiple places down the list, but you really don’t want to have to learn Rust and possibly reinvent wheels for your quick boilerplate hack.

      • toastal@lemmy.ml
        21·
        2 days ago

        I literally used to say this last decade, but as I grew experienced with more languages/paradigms/systems, it became 3rd best, then 4th, until I realized it actually not really great at anything other than there is an large ecosystem around it (wildly varying in quality). To some that might be enough, & going outside what you know isn’t typically the most wise thing to do, but it’s not particularly simple, or readble, or performance, or composable, or offering great patterns. Anything that used Python in Nixpkgs tend to be the most unreliable software for actually building & using.

    • LANIK2000@lemmy.world
      152·
      2 days ago

      Can’t speak for the science libraries as I’ve never used em, and I’ll gladly just blindly accept that as truth, but for everything else it’s always a pain in the ass. For being designed to “run on anything” it sure is funny that 90% of the time I download a python app it doesn’t fucking work and requires me to look up and manually setup a specific environment for it. Doesn’t help that the error messages are usually completely random and unrelated to this…

      I always dread when some fucking madman makes the installer for their app in python, knowing it’ll probably fail… God forbid it’s a script that’s supposed to modify something else. Always a good time for reflection upon the choices that led me to this point.

      Even my old scripts I kept around for sentimental value. Half of those don’t work either, and I can’t be bothered to figure out what version I made em for.

      I tried my best to scrub python from my pc out of principle, but as you say, it’s soo common my distro uses it as a dependency, fucking bullshit!

      • Kichae@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        Is great until you need a job. It solves the 2 language problem right up until you’re working with others.

      • dudinax@programming.dev
        2·
        2 days ago

        I guess I don’t know. Whenever something tempts me to R, I quickly find that Python’s got a good-enough solution.

        • Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 days ago

          R is better if you want some very specific, niche statistical packages.

          Python is better if you want to combine statistics with any other compute process.

        • menemen@lemmy.ml
          3·
          2 days ago

          Same for me with python, I always fall back to R after 10 minutes of trying to do it in python. :)

  • fossphi@lemm.eeEnglish
    471·
    3 days ago

    Oh god, I feel this. Why can’t there be a sane language‽

    • xavier666@lemm.eeEnglish
      44·
      2 days ago

      There are 2 types of programming languages

      • The type everyone keeps complaining about
      • The type no one uses
    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      54·
      3 days ago

      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.

      This message brought to you by TempleOS

    • wewbull@feddit.ukEnglish
      13·
      2 days ago

      Computer programming, regardless of language, is hard. The computer does exactly what you tell it to.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
        1·
        21 hours ago

        Yes. That being said, it matters which language you choose. COBOL is always a bad choice, unless writing in COBOL is the whole point. There isn’t really a universal best choice, either. Python is often a good one, but if you’re doing something big it will become this meme.

  • brettvitaz@programming.devEnglish
    246·
    2 days ago

    Very little of this is uniquely a problem in Python. It seems to me that your problem is with software development in general.

        • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
          1·
          14 hours ago

          What’s the difference? I rarely use Python and every time I do I have to relearn which tools are the go to ones. In Java it’s a little simpler, we really just have Maven and Gradle. They have their own problems, sure, what tool doesn’t, but the thing that annoys me about python is the quantity of tools. There often isn’t a clear winner.

          Now, to be fair to python, a lot of the ones mentioned on this post are very specifically for data science use cases and not general purpose development.

        • synae[he/him]@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          3·
          2 days ago

          That’s the part I like the most. I don’t want to work on any code that isn’t properly formatted, and at that point why bother with curly braces, etc?

          • Tiefling IRL@lemmy.blahaj.zone
            2·
            2 days ago

            They help to digest the individual code blocks. My mind doesn’t digest whitespace the same way, it simply interprets it as formatting.

            It’s also much more frustrating to edit imo since the formatter generally has no idea what to do with misaligned whitespace. I also find it frustrating that you can’t do multiline lambdas, last I used it.

        • azimir@lemmy.ml
          6·
          2 days ago

          The same meme with “wiring and lights” at the top. Then you descend to motors, transformers delta-y phases, RC and RL circuits, op amps, BJT circuits, reverse bias what?, differential equations, and eventually signals and systems.

          • HStone32@lemmy.world
            2·
            2 days ago

            at least then you’re dealing with the laws of nature instead of man-made BS. if you’re like me and have 0 tolerance for BS, it’s an absolute win.

            • azimir@lemmy.ml
              1·
              2 days ago

              Your perspective might be why I enjoy microcontroller work. I love getting to know everything about the system, reading hardware documentation, and getting the low level parts to work in a highly deterministic way.

              I use ATTiny85 cores when a ESP32 costs almost the same, but the 85 only has 256 bytes of SRAM and five I/O pins so I can track it all and ensure it will do exactly what I want.

  • SatyrSack@lemmy.one
    192·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • MashedTech@lemmy.worldOP
      211·
      3 days ago

      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.

      • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
        2·
        21 hours ago

        For someone starting out, I would say that a major advantage of Python over any compiled language is that you can just create a file and start writing/running code. With C++ (which I’m also a heavy user of) you need to get over the hurdle of setting up a build system, which is simple enough when you know it, but can quickly be a high bar for an absolute beginner. That’s before you start looking at things like including/linking other libraries, which in Python is done with a simple import, but where you have to set up your build system properly to get things working in C++.

        Honestly, I’m still kind of confused that the beginner course at my old university still insists on giving out a pre-written makefile and vscode config files for everyone instead of spending the first week just showing people how to actually write and compile hello world using cmake. I remember my major hurdle when leaving that course was that I knew how to write basic C++, I just had no idea how to compile and link it when I could no longer use the makefile that we were explicitly told to never touch…

        • SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip
          1·
          10 hours ago

          100 times this.

          I think I have a solid grasp of C++ and its manual memory management, but give me a build error and I’ll have zero clue how to fix it.

      • xpinchx@lemmy.world
        92·
        2 days ago

        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.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
      9·
      2 days ago

      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.

  • fin@sh.itjust.works
    101·
    2 days ago

    While being controversial, rye is very good for small personal projects. It does pretty much everything from python version management to project scaffolding.

  • DerArzt@lemmy.world
    82·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
      4·
      2 days ago

      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…

    • Pennomi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      Why would it be a bad sign that the language has built in tools for common things you need to do?

      • Ephera@lemmy.ml
        5·
        2 days ago

        I’m guessing, they meant to write “that the language has no default way”.

      • driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br
        2·
        2 days ago

        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.