• heavy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    441·
    3 months ago

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

  • jeffhykin@lemm.ee
    38·
    3 months ago

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

  • dudinax@programming.dev
    331·
    3 months 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
      272·
      3 months 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.

      • toastal@lemmy.ml
        22·
        3 months 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.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
        4·
        3 months 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.

    • LANIK2000@lemmy.world
      8·
      3 months 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·
        3 months 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
        1·
        3 months 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·
          3 months 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
          2·
          3 months ago

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

  • Machindo@lemmy.ml
    23·
    3 months 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.

  • powermaker450@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    18·
    3 months 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

  • toastal@lemmy.ml
    182·
    3 months ago

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

  • brettvitaz@programming.devEnglish
    9·
    3 months 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
          2·
          3 months 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
          4·
          3 months 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
            4·
            3 months 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
          3·
          3 months 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
            1·
            3 months 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·
              3 months 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
    91·
    3 months 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
      5·
      3 months 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·
        3 months 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
          2·
          3 months 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
        31·
        3 months 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
      1·
      3 months 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.

  • DerArzt@lemmy.world
    0·
    3 months 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
      2·
      3 months 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…

      • psud@aussie.zone
        1·
        3 months ago

        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?

        • Ephera@lemmy.ml
          1·
          3 months ago

          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.

          • psud@aussie.zone
            1·
            3 months ago

            So it’s big and diverse ecosystem with multiple standards to choose between

            The problem isn’t that it’s missing something like cpan, it’s that there are ten incompatible ones to choose between

            Remind me not to learn python. If I get into microcontrollers I shall use their C++ like language not micropython ;)

            I really like the ability to dig up code from twenty years ago and just run it

    • Pennomi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

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

      • driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br
        0·
        3 months 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.

  • fin@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    3 months ago

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

    • lime!@feddit.nuEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      they are also working on a follow-up, uv. not really a fan of writing tooling in another language but it works really well.

    • Pumpkin Escobar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Coming from c# then typescript and nextjs, rye feels very intuitive and like a nice bridge / gateway drug into python.

      • marlowe221@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        I know this may be an unpopular opinion on lemmy, which leans so heavily towards Linux and FOSS, and I’m a Linux user myself but….

        I actually really like C# and .NET (the modern cross-platform version anyway).

  • pete_the_cat@lemmy.worldEnglish
    01·
    3 months ago

    The thing that annoys me the most is how it cares about whitespace/carriage returns. I remember back in college when I was taking a CS class, learning Python and writing the Code on a Windows PC, emailing it to myself, and then attempting to run the code on Linux. Before I learned about the carriage return conversions, I remember having to rewrite about 75 lines of code before I got it to run. 🤬