Oh god, I feel this. Why can’t there be a sane language‽
But the Lord came down to see the
cityOS and thetowerapp the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one peoplespeakingprogramming 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
cityOS. 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.
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While Java js definitely one of the best, it still has some quirks that you need to know about.
There are 2 types of programming languages
- The type everyone keeps complaining about
- The type no one uses
Computer programming, regardless of language, is hard. The computer does exactly what you tell it to.
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.
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.
Why would it be a bad sign that the language has built in tools for common things you need to do?
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…
Does python not require you to include your libraries? How can the runtime environment not tell you “you used whatever library but whatever library isn’t installed” is it then hard to find the library? Does python not have anything like perl’s cpan to consolidate all libraries? Can’t you just grep for the libraries a project calls and loop over the results adding that library to the build environment?
It does have that, the ecosystem is just really fractured and also not good.
Sort of the ‘standard’ way of managing dependencies is with Pip and a requirements.txt. By itself, that installs dependencies on your host system.
So, there’s a second tool, venv, to install them per-project, but because it’s a separate tool, it has to do some wacky things, namely it uses separate pip and python executables, which you have to specify in your IDE.
But then Pip also can’t build distributions, there’s a separate tool for that, setup.py, and it doesn’t support things like .lock-files for reproducible builds, and if I remember correctly, it doesn’t deal well with conflicting version requirements and probably various other things.
Either way, people started building a grand unified package manager to cover all these use-cases. Well, multiple people did so, separately. So, now you’ve got, among others:
- Pipenv
- Pip-tools
- Conda
- PDM
- Poetry
- Rye
Well, and these started creating their own methods of specifying dependencies and I believe, some of them still need to be called like a venv, but others not, so that means IDEs struggle to support all these.
Amazingly, apart from Rye, which didn’t exist back when we started that project, none of these package managers support directly depending on libraries within the same repo. You always have to tag a new version, publish it, and then you can fix your dependent code.
And yeah, that was then the other reason why this stuff didn’t work for us. We spent a considerable amount of time with symlinks and custom scripts to try to make that work.
I’m willing to believe that we fucked things up when doing that, but what makes still no sense is that everything worked when running tests from the CLI, but the IDE showed nothing but red text.
I didnt upvote the other python-beginer friendly meme cause it wasn’t accurate. But this one is on 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.
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…
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.
