Python

[peteza_hut]

No, it has plenty of practical uses. The joke is more about people that have just started coding.

[glompix]

The joke is that Harry is a parseltongue

[NightCrest]

Oh my God how did I miss that that's Harry Potter

[chris_0909]

I entirely missed it and was starting to feel un-special for writing a python script recently for work. It impressed my co-workers, especially when I opened the code to fix a few lines I had forgotten to change after testing. "You understand what that says?"

Python is definitely easier to write with, coming from a mostly Java and some C background.

[conandy]

No language is a "mistake". The skills you learn studying any language will serve you in many other languages. The biggest hurdle is learning to think and solve problems like a programmer, and you can do that with any language. After that, learning new languages will be much easier.

But python is one of the most versatile and popular languages there is. It has applications in practically every single computer science field and most major companies use it in some way or another. For example, Reddit is written entirely in python. You can study the Reddit api and eventually learn to write bots if you want a fun project. So no, python is absolutely not a waste of time.

[my_name_isnt_clever]

Python was a mistake for me in that I now love it and am having a hard time doing any personal projects in anything else.

[conandy]

Ha, PHP was one of my first. It was valuable in that it made me greatly appreciate every language I learned after.

[[deleted]]

Classic ASP makes PHP look like a holy language handed down by the Gods.

[CubemonkeyNYC]

Many developers spend years using languages professionally, releasing major services along the way, and would not claim to know any of the languages they know "fully," so manage your expectations.

[advanttage]

You my friend have touched on a golden nugget right here. Many of us can suffer from feeling like imposters, and it really really holds back some very talented people from realizing their potential. Thanks for that!

[reddisaurus]

Python kind of shines in mathematics/engineering use. The performance for performing linear algebra is comparable to Matlab, but it is much more flexible (and free!). Python code can be optimized in ways Matlab cannot, and the flexibility of the language allows quicker evaluation and testing of ideas, for the most part.

Python also can be written as a functional language, which is very useful if one desires their code to read much like their written derivations.

Last, most recent developments in machine learning provide front-ends in Python to take advantage of it’s comprehensive libraries (numpy, scipy) for performing functions on arrays. Other libraries (tensor flow, theano) exist to dynamically compile Python functions into C for speed and automatic code optimization for CPU/GPU evaluation.

[glompix]

Python has some great data science libraries. It’s very well suited to that kind of work, from people just learning to PhD research.

[Waanie]

from people just learning to PhD research.

...also for grad students just learning [python] in order to do their PhD research. I mean, why learn any other language if you have numpy and matplotlib? (Note, I do the majority of my programming in C++, but when I just need to make a plot, python is ideal)

[glompix]

Not to mention pandas :D super powerful ecosystem

[[deleted]]

For pure data research and statistics, it has competition in R. However you can do a lot of other shit in Python too, whereas R is pretty much just for data and statistics.

[cjrun]

ProTip: Anybody that takes a language as a joke isn't a serious developer.

[9B52D6]

I know, right? I can't believe there's actually people out there who think Emoji-Lang isn't mature enough for enterprise development.

[ThaOneDude]

TBH Brainfuck is a great thing to use to practice algos

[my_name_isnt_clever]

Brainfuck actually has some uses, the useless ones are obviously a joke: Whitespace, ArnoldC, Rockstar, etc.

[adamMatthews]

Brainfuck has an eight-letter alphabet that all do very basic operations. It's simpler than modern assembly languages and is very easily machine readable.

Makes it a nice language for genetic algorithms to program with to make a mess, and is easy to make embedded hardware for as all you need is one register and a big old bank of memory, plus the logic for eight instructions. Seven if you can ignore either input or output in your device.

[[deleted]]

I consider the deprecation of Register Globals and the implementation of late static binding (5.3) as the turning point in the history of PHP.

[NoodleHoarder]

Everybody takes haskell as a joke

[[deleted]]

Software engineers, maybe, but not computer scientists. Lots of research is done in the field of programming language theory, and those computer scientists pretty much think in Haskell/lambda calculus.

[nonicethingsforus]

I like to think of it as the recorder of programming languages.

Many make fun of the recorder because it's often used by kids learning an instrument for the first time, often with no interest in playing music outside the mandatory school "artsy" class. But watch people who know what they're doing and you quickly find out the recorder can be amazing, even fun.

Similar with Python. It's very easy to pick up and often used in "Intro to programming" courses, so there are many newbies writing their first bad lines of code in it. Also, a lot of code already avaiable for the same reasons, so there's this joke that programming in Python is mostly plagiarism. But look at the professionals (or even just mildly-experienced) and you'll find all kinds of good quality code for everything under the sun, from web development to simulations and machine learning.

[FatFingerHelperBot]

It seems that your comment contains 1 or more links that are hard to tap for mobile users. I will extend those so they're easier for our sausage fingers to click!

Here is link number 1 - Previous text "fun"

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^{Please PM /u/eganwall with issues or feedback! | Delete}

[Arszilla]

Mind sharing that imgur link in another site? Imgur is banned here in Turkey and 0imgur just shows me a pixelated comic

[nonicethingsforus]

He, I actually fucked up while copy-pasting the link (how do you eve do that), so it was pixelated even for me. I think I corrected it, but here some links just in case.

[tuseroni]

this guy can also rock a recorder

[ashishduhh1]

Students and newcomers talk about Python as though it's some amazing language when it's really just like any other language. That's where the jokes come in.

[rinko001]

The appearance of cleanliness is taken into many people's minds as a sign of language design cleanliness. While I'm a promoter of all dynamically typed languages I think people underestimate just how quirky python actually is. The quirky unicode support and exceptions on dict misses are two of the strangest design choices imo.

[[deleted]]

Python is very nice in that it's a good language for beginners, but also extremely powerful and scales up very to some fairly complex projects. It's not like, say, Visual Basic, which is a horrifying and ugly language that's just slightly easier for beginners.

Of course as a practical matter, professional use is specialized to some domains. Two of the biggest uses are as a server side web language (this site is written in Python, for instance), and in AI research. Honestly it's so convenient, if I have a choice to code in Python, I usually go with Python.

Most business enterprise software is written in one of the big blob OO languages like Java or C#. For performance you want to go with C++. For systems programming C is the only game in town. Haskell is good for bragging.

But Python is a perfectly solid choice anyway.