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.”
Nah, give me that Fisher Price Baby Screwdriver that’s easy to use and cannot build a space shuttle.
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
screwdriver that’s awkward to hold
honestly i expected the fifth panel to be full of things like “GIL”, “2to3”, “virtualenv” “pip vs conda vs poetry vs…”, “mypy”, etc
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.
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)
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.
I was exposed to both basic and python first. No wonder it was so much harder for me to do code!
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.
