handing my friend a screwdriver
"You can use this for simple crafts and home repairs"
Me, backing away from the screwdriver in terror
"Nice try, but I know what that is. They use that thing to build the Space Shuttle."
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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Nah, give me that Fisher Price Baby Screwdriver that's easy to use and cannot build a space shuttle.
-.- you've just described a significant portion of my home remodeling….
-.-
I think I need to learn new skills…
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?
Yes.
alright, if python is a regular screwdriver, what is C? a single iron filing?
edit: I'm starting to doubt any of you have ever used C
The bar metal used to make the screwdriver
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honestly i expected the fifth panel to be full of things like "GIL", "2to3", "virtualenv" "pip vs conda vs poetry vs...", "mypy", etc
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.
You misspelled C++
C++ is at least backwards compatible (for 99% of code anyway, yes I know about some features being removed, but that's an exception and not the rule).
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Surprised not to see meta-classes or package management in the meme.
EDIT: clarification
Am I an idiot or isn't the "pip vs conda vs poetry" line talking about package management?
It is, and it's a valid complaint. Go and Rust have handled it differently than Python or JavaScript, and all of them have their faults and bonuses.
Python is a general purpose language. Yes you can do ML stuff and some mathematics, but that doesn’t mean you need to do them.
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.
Yeah, that was the correct answer
Gratz
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.
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.
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
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).
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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).
That sounds similar to this quote:
"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.
But that's just my 2 cents.
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 was exposed to both basic and python first. No wonder it was so much harder for me to do code!
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.
If you learn by doing, chose the language appropriate for the pet project you are developing.
You could use JavaScript although I would go straight to TypeScript. Or maybe C#.
I am biased as I work with TS and C# .Net.
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.
Ouch, I feel your pain. My high school education consisted of one course in C getting as far as pointers, then the next in Python.
Math is going to perpetually be the downfall of most morons wanting to computer science.
Sure, python is easy. But have you tried package management in python versus other languages?
Having come from the world of C++, this was a huge step up.
pip is legit trash when trying to update modules
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.
Not just math but actual maths
That's like math^2
Math**2
It's a load bearing S.
It’s just a weird typeface, it’s actually Math 5. You’re behind 4 versions.
I can confirm, too
I'll die on this hill.
If you want an easy language for beginners, Ruby is a much better alternative. It's like a simpler Python, and aside from a crazy loop syntax teaches clean programming principles better than most languages.
With that said, Rails IS a ghetto, and many of the kinds of companies that use Ruby as their main language are stuck in the past or are full of the biggest toolbags you'll ever meet. DHH, in particular, built a reputation on being a programming contrarian, so much so that there's a golden rule where if he says something, the opposite is probably the correct choice.
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