Some people think that because Python is the easiest language to learn, it's going to be easy to learn programming with Python. But learning programming is still very hard, so many abstract concepts to grasp. Python just makes it a tiny less hard, almost insignificantly now that we can use an LLM to learn the syntax faster than than ever.

[–] AnAmericanPotato 27 points 2 months ago (3 children)

In practice, Python is not easy to learn programming with. Not at all. I see beginners wrestling with Anaconda and Jupyter notebooks and I weep.

The fact that pip is intentionally broken on macOS and some modern Linux distros sure doesn't help. Everything about environment management is insane.

[–] tyler 21 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Comparing python env management to Ruby or rust or even Java for fucks sake just goes to show that nobody actually cares about how easy a language is to use, they just care about what is popular or what they think is popular.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Ruby, of all the examples you could come up with? My Redmine is updated only every few years because I rarely have a whole day to deal with the mess that is Ruby deps managent.

Java deals with this ellegantly.

[–] tyler 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Huh? I assume you mean RubyMine and I have no clue what dependency issues you could be dealing with unless you’re on windows (which python is even worse with). You have one package manager and one build tool on Ruby, compared to Python’s now 16 tools. Ruby is the gold star for package management which is why both Rust and Elixir copied enormous parts of it when creating their tools cargo and mix.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

https://www.redmine.org/ is a standard rails webapp. Nothing special. Straightforward to update, just a few commands, the only quirk is that at least one step always fails. Some obscure bug in a dependency, some problem with expected vs installed system libraries, or my favourite, a Segmentation Fault.

[–] tyler 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Conflating a Ruby on Rails app to all of Ruby is just not really fair. It’s like comparing Lombok to Java. Lombok is a hot fucking mess and Java app with it is gonna have difficulty at later points.

Aside from that (I think rails is honestly terrible), just looking at the repo I can see that RedMine doesn’t use bundler, which is the singular standard in the Ruby community, so it’s like saying “a project I use uses Ant under the hood so Java is bad”. Like I said, there’s a reason that Rust and Elixir based their build tools off of Ruby’s.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I haven't had any problems with redmine itself but with dependencies and the Ruby runtime.

And if you're saying I don't have enough experience to make claims about Ruby dep management, I can say the same about you Python. Works flawlessly for me.

[–] tyler 1 points 1 month ago

I have thousands of hours programming in python. Ruby is several thousands more. I know exactly how shit the Python ecosystem is. https://chriswarrick.com/blog/2023/01/15/how-to-improve-python-packaging/

(Now we’re at 15 now since that article came out, with the introduction of Rye).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

That is because when you're a beginner, you read everywhere that you should be using anaconda and jupyter notebooks. I know because I did so. Neither of them lasted more than a week on my computer though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Development environment is a mess, but given its popularity, it's not difficult to find an up to date tutorial. Then it is the easiest I think, you will be able to try programming basics and get a minimum viable product (small web app, small analytics...) easlier than with any other language.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Nah, php over python any day. Equally easy to start, equally fucked up core, but the ecosystem around it is so much saner and easier. And I'd argue it's even easier for beginners.

Unless you need something that only has python bindings, I'd never choose python.

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