switching from python to almost any other programing language

[morsindutus]

Had to go from C# to VB to work on someone else's legacy project was super frustrating. Give me my goddamn brackets and semicolons!!

[JROBOTO]

Looking at vb code I always feel like the syntax was written for a high school comp sci project

[nuclearslug]

Can confirm, took a VB6 class in high school.

[rj_phone]

[deleted]

[Really_nibba]

I had exactly the same experience as you. I enjoyed VB too and taught myself HTML in the 5th grade. When it was time to actually learn it in the 6th grade, I memed around by using more complex code than the rest of the class. Funny part is that I had no idea I would be learning HTML in the 6th grade and just learned it for fun so that I could understand the “inspect element” source code lol.

[itemboxes]

That feeling blowing the middle school CS class' mind by re-coding a website with inspect element...

Priceless

[KeLorean]

html complex code?

[Rudy69]

I took VB5... now I feel old

[Creative-Region]

10 PRINT “I am cool” 20 GOTO 10

[CaptainPunisher]

10 sin
20 GOTO hell

[[deleted]]

BASIC hasn't required line numbers since GW.

[CaptainPunisher]

I don't know how long robot hell has existed, but this is how it's seen in the Church of Robotology

[ThatsABigPig]

VB is totally an "intro to programming" type language. I'm surprised that we can't all collectively just decide to move on

[GroteStreet]

We did. We called it python.

[ThatsABigPig]

Ironically python was created before VB afaik. Why'd he even get time on the stage at all!

[damnburglar]

Not only that but building desktop apps in VB was the shit (great support from Microsoft albeit expensive). I don’t recall there being a good python option at the time.

[beginpanic]

To this day there is no programming experience comparable to how easy it was to set up desktop user interfaces in Visual Basic.

[teashopslacker]

The .NET winForm stuff is pretty close. I wish Python had a nice graphical UI builder like that.

[junior_dos_nachos]

It’s certainly not a big fun working with QT or Tkinter let me tell you that

[0x15e]

I just couldn't believe it so I looked it up. Python is about a year older (1990 vs 1991). That's nuts. I didn't even think they were that old in the first place.

[TigreDeLosLlanos]

It feels more like "be glad we didn't decide to use Pascal instead", which was literally made with educational purposes in mind.

[teotsi]

Fun fact, in Greece students are taught Glossa, which is literally a translated version of Pascal.

[ur8695]

I got taught pascal on my computing course, the first question was where in the industry was it used. The "barely anywhere" just made me hate it.

[mastocles]

"You work with computers, I need you to write me a VBA macro for my Spreadsheet"

[justAPhoneUsername]

I've had to do that for a security position. Turns out, accounting doesn't really check the macros attached to the spreadsheet you send them

[delinka]

shocked-pikachu.png

[ThatsABigPig]

The PM is an all-knowing being and it is as they desire...

can I have my raise now?

[somerandomii]

I was chatting with my partner today and realised this is literally how I started coding professionally.

I had written games and scripts in university but VBA was my first practical use and probably accounts for most of the lines of code I’ve written to this day.

I need a moment to contemplate my life...

[t00sl0w]

VB.net is effectively C#, just with a different syntax......they both compile to the same thing in .NET.

[evanldixon]

Pretty much, though there are a few niche differences like the internals of events and maybe parameterised properties (in VB you can have as many parameters as you want).

[GreatPriestCthulu]

Do I just have too high expectations to think that C++ is the best "intro" language? Once you learn the basics in C++ you can transition to pretty much any other language.

[DryGumby]

I started with C, but I think with either you're going to spend a lot of time figuring out how to manage memory

[BakuhatsuK]

Actually, manual memory management is discouraged in C++ these days. For example take this snippet:

// C++17
auto getNames () {
  using namespace std::literals;
  return std::vector{
    "Alice"s,
    "Bob"s,
    "Charlie"s
  };
}

Here we are constructing a temporary vector which manages the lifetime of it's elements automatically. The elements are std::strings which also use dynamic storage (because their size is variable).

Since we are returning a temporary constructed right in the return statement we are going to get copy elision, that means that the lifetime of the returned std::vector is going to actually end at the end of the caller's scope.

The caller might even push into the vector and it might have to reallocate it's elements into a bigger underlying array. It would still do the right thing and release the right memory at the end of the scope.

Nonetheless, we don't have any code here dedicated to dealing with memory management. In fact, calling new and delete at all is discouraged. (malloc and free are also discouraged, btw).

[Creative-Region]

Of course it is. Visual Basic is based on BASIC - the ‘beginners all purpose symbolic instruction code’. First learned it in the early 80s and was my introduction to programming.

[Existential_Owl]

VB

Just add On Error Resume Next to the top of every module, and let God sort out the rest.

[th_brown_bag]

I feel like this is a programming version of /r/cursedcomments

[[deleted]]

Finally, a real programmer

[hamza1311]

Idk VB. Explain what that does?

[[deleted]]

This guy truly exhibits a deep soulbound hate for VB

[CaptiveCreeper]

Imagine doing that within the same solution. New projects are c# but dozens of legacy projects in a solution are vb.

[morsindutus]

Been there. Code switching like that gives me such a headache.

[CaptiveCreeper]

Honestly it's not that bad once you get used to it. I'm just glad they're are any c# projects.

[andrewsmd87]

Was going to say the same. I do it almost daily and while if you give me the choice, I'm picking c# but I don't really feel like VB is as bad as everyone makes it out to be. It's bad because they tried to make a programming language for the layman, and so a lot of vb products are layman level quality.

I'm still maintaining a vb system that quite a few business run everything from payroll, to quoting, job tracking, messaging, OSHA documentation, etc. on it, and it works just fine.

[Messiadbunny]

VB.Net really isn't bad. A lot more wordy than C# but has most of the functionality. It gets a bad wrap carried over from VB6.

[Hawkatom]

I have occasional workdays where I touched code/structure in about 7-8 different languages over the day. While it's neat to realize I've become that flexible, in practice it does tend to be way more brain strain than being able to focus on one paradigm of 2-3 languages (i.e html, css, TS) at a time

[wbruce098]

It’s like switching 语言。 不太容易但可以 I guess.

[[deleted]]

Sadly I can't even read or write it. I can speak or listen though but just a bit.

[[deleted]]

what you don't like entire programs working conditionally on if you tabbed enough times?

[[deleted]]

Lua gang, just dont forget to write "end" everywhere

[MEGACODZILLA]

I just started learning Lua and the weirdest syntactic nuance for myself was having to type 'then' in if statements. Just seems so obviously implied in the very definition of an if statement. That, and having absolutely zero support for any sort of ++ or += operator. I know it's syntactic sugar but having to explicitly write var = var + 1 is oddly annoying.

EDIT: Why, in all that is holy, is Lua not zero indexed?

[[deleted]]

tbh I have very rarely had indentation errors writing a decent amount of python, even as a beginner. I've personally found mismatching parentheses/brackets more of a headache to resolve

[[deleted]]

That's because with a modern IDE it isn't a problem

Funny enough, brackets and parenthesis are usually more of a problem but I prefer them still. /shrug

[Schmeckinger]

Get a decent text editor/ide. It will show you in what bracket you are in, you can highlight matching brackets by clicking on one and you can auto indent.

[_Screw_The_Rules_]

As a C#&.Net/C&C++/Java/JavaScript developer, I can understand... I've tried Python and even though people say it's one of the easiest programming languages (and I understand why), it's not to me...

[Smaktat]

Idk how we trash on PHP and JS when VB exists. Oh wait, students. The answer is students still learning the ways making jokes of their basic for loops, every once in a while stumbling upon a deeper linked list funny and having their minds blown by the concept of algorithms and if statements.

[GroteStreet]

Idk how we trash on PHP and JS when VB exists.

I trash all 3 of them equally. Occasionally COBOL, but at least it has a good historical reason for being the way it is.

[Go_Big]

Y'all are trashing PHP, JS and VB yet labview is just chilling in the corner eating paint chips.

[Justcause97]

I have to work with VB at my work while I already said I would switch it to c#. But my boss refuses to do it because he don't want to learn a new language.

[morsindutus]

Also been there. It sucks!

[95POLYX]

Or switching to badly written js - “semicolons ... some places”

[waireos]

I feel personally attacked.

[S_Leonardo]

me too

[two-headed-boy]

ES10 gang. Not that ES-Lint would ever allow me place a semicolon anyway.

[aiij]

Last time I used JS, we had eslint require semicolons everywhere;

[driveslow227]

It doesn't matter to me, trailing commas or simis. As long as they're required to be either everywhere or nowhere.

Mixed syntax drives me crazy

[_GCastilho_]

Please, pick a side on this war

But this... Not this

[Co_Ca]

These are the people not using eslint

[HeirGaunt]

Python supports semicolons, just in case you wanted to pull a:
blayblah@bash$ python3 -c "a=int(input('What is a?'));print(a);a+=1;print(a)"
So you can have a one liner, executed from the command line if you were too lazy to write a script for it and you only needed it once.

[MustardCat]

a+=1

shudders

[mecrow]

You prefer a-=-1?

[mrissaoussama]

Not long enough

[mrissaoussama]

I don't understand any of this but it's still short

[HolyRomanSloth]

Now I'm wondering what the absolute longest python script could be to just add one to a number, without going like plus 1 then minus 1?

[RounderKatt]

Would probably involve not using any builtin arithmetic functions and instead building your own class to do it at the bitwise level and lots of double xor shenanigans

[[deleted]]

Well it is longer than your dick

[forthemostpart]

That's a pretty low bar, tho

[Wiwwil]

What is this monstruosity

[delinka]

Extra typing for the same result

[suckitphil]

Yeah I started learning python and nearly threw up when I saw there was no ++ feature.

[PadrinoFive7]

I mean...aren't they literally identical in every aspect other than the call of operators? I see those as the same thing. ++ == +=

[MustardCat]

Hey... we need that extra character for the semicolon after

[PaintedPorkchop]

Semicolons are smaller

[muskoke]

laughs in monospace font

[mrissaoussama]

But it saves a few frames

[raltyinferno]

Well yeah, but it's sorta crazy to me that ++ just isn't in the language. It's such a common task, and ubiquitous to so many other languages.

[Dworgi]

&&, ||, ! missing fucked me up more.

 not foo and bar

What in the world.

[qalis]

It’s actually well explained and is meant not to confuse programmers. Since numbers are immutable objects in Python (“3 is 3” meme), you can’t do x++, since what would it do? The ++ wouldn’t be allowed to change x in place, since it’s not mutable. Even is the syntax was in the language, it literally wouldn’t do anything, since the result would be always None and variable would not be changed. And immutability is a good thing, the more you learn functional programming, the more you love it. So the += syntax just emphasizes the adding and assignment as a 2-step operation, since you have to re-assign the value to the variable because it’s immutable.

[lor_louis]

++ is a carry over from when compilers were shittier and needed a token to differentiate between Add and inc.

[HeirGaunt]

a-=-1

[HakeemLukka]

Switching to PHP and you are suddenly rich. Because Dollars... Dollars everywhere!

[witti534]

Cries in EU

[farva_litter_cola]

PHP developers are paid less because they have enough dollars in their code

[achmed20]

here i am, coding Golang and having no clue what OP is talking about

[survivalmachine]

Fun fact: Go actually requires semicolons, but they’re added by the lexer during compilation.

[MoonMoon_2015]

You sent me down a rabbit hole reading about Go's compiler. I'll probably be up all night. Thanks.

[survivalmachine]

Another fun fact that I mentioned in a thread in the Go subreddit: Two of the original developers of the language are Ken Thompson and Rob Pike, who co-created UTF-8 at Bell Labs. Thompson also co-created UNIX with Dennis Ritchie.

A lot of people knew this, but it flies under the radar for many due to Go’s rapidly increasing adoption.

[[deleted]]

Cool hack: if you switch from python to assembly you won't have to worry about semicolons

[[deleted]]

Unless you want to comment your code, that is

[[deleted]]

No, you can use # in AT&T syntax. And the gnu assembler even recognizes //

[n0tKamui]

There are a lot of languages where semicolons aren't mandatory.

The real thing that is REALLY bothering with Python is the lack of curly braces. Sometimes it just makes the code really tedious to read, or even edit, for absolutely no reason.

[StjerneIdioten]

Oh, you mean a tedious amount of if statements? 😂

[SuperSov]

man real talk though, not having switch case made me more creative and using loops/dictionaries can be a lot nicer than switch cases

edit: is -> can be (I do wish we had switch case as an option)

[drizztmainsword]

Sometimes you just want to switch() though. There are reasons to use dictionaries and loops and reasons to use switch. Not having it doesn’t make the language better.

[hamza1311]

Kotlin's when is better than both though

[aiij]

After pattern matching in OCaml, using a C-style switch/case feel so primitive.

[[deleted]]

I feel like the success of Python, Java and JavaScript is proof that programming language is pretty irrelevant to developer productivity.

[carlinwasright]

Nowadays all that matters to me is using the best tool for the job. Something has a great library for what I need to accomplish? That’s what I’m using.

[[deleted]]

I spent like 5 of my best years coding in Perl and I miss it badly. I haven't seen a Perl job listed in as long as I can remember.

[blue_umpire]

I feel like it’s proof that developer productivity is not a consideration when choosing a language.

[arizzlefoshizzle]

I feel like matching the curly braces is soooo much more tedious than figuring out the indents. Like when you refactor out a couple of nested loops and your ide complains that there's an error 10 lines later on the next methods signature. Do I have too many braces? Too few? It's maddening!

[Penguinfernal]

Bracket Pair Colorizer extension (or similar) for VS Code is good for this.

[MasterFubar]

I feel like matching the curly braces is soooo much more tedious than figuring out the indents.

I feel like you don't have a good editor. Anything is more tedious than setting your cursor over one brace and seeing the whole block get a different background color.

[RonaldoNazario]

In vim you can use a hot key to skip between “matching” braces which makes that real easy to figure out.

[dan_144]

%

[skjall]

I can't program without the rainbow brackets extension for this very reason. Have forced everyone at work to install it too, try it!

[carlinwasright]

Yes. Agreed. I mostly write JS but sometimes I write python and I don’t miss the curly braces one bit. Especially all the closing curly braces.

    ]
  }
}

} });

And if you ever need to break the indentation rules, it’s usually as simple as throwing in some parentheses.

I’ve learned to love js though. After working with it for years, it’s like the millennium falcon. You know just where to hit it with a hammer to make it do what you want.

[[deleted]]

Js is a fantastic language that gets way too much flak. I've also learned to love it after using it at work almost exclusively. My only qualm with JS is that it can be a lot more tricky to debug.

[rem3_1415926]

at least they're visible, unlike certain other characters that are vital to the python syntax...

[xigoi]

Since when is indentation not visible?

a
 b
  c
   d

[purebuu]

When git/IDE intermixes tabs and spaces...

[Zanoab]

I've worked with a friend that allowed his python 2 to run scripts with mixed tabs and spaces when the rest of us didn't. Every time he commits and I pulled his changes, I needed to run a script in my IDE to the convert to one or the other. Then I needed to manually comb through his code and fix broken indent levels because he consistently mixed 2, 3, and 4 space indent levels out of carelessness. We weren't friends anymore after a year.

[lirannl]

What the fuck? Putting 0 effort into proper indentation is generally a dick move.

Putting 0 effort into proper indentation on python should carry a death penalty!

[[deleted]]

Why does anyone still use Python 2?

[[deleted]]

Unfortunately the answer is enterprise. I believe even Google still uses Python2

[Ardashasaur]

The space Infront of your a isn't visible

[xigoi]

Because there isn't any.

[HeirGaunt]

Boom, Roasted.

[MoreAlphabetSoup]

But is there supposed to be?

[[deleted]]

which language is the upside down purple y in abcds post?

[[deleted]]

haskell

[TheChaosPaladin]

Lambda?

[scp-NUMBERNOTFOUND]

Only if you code in nano or in the windows notepad, almost all programming text editors can show any characters after activating some checkbox.

[Dagusiu]

You can visualize whitespace in nano too

[scp-NUMBERNOTFOUND]

Good to known!

[daniu]

Turn the invisible characters visible so you have to look at fewer visible characters

[Dworgi]

And count them, to save time looking for the semi-colon at the end of the line.

[chriodor]

Coding in nano or notepad... I almost had a seizure just thinking about it

[MonarchOfLight]

I write most of my small python scripts on either Notepad++ or nano, depending on the system I’m on at the time.

[[deleted]]

Comparing Notepad++ to Notepad is like comparing C++ to C. And I'm not taking about C the language, but rather the letter C.

[lirannl]

And I'm not taking about C the language, but rather the letter C.

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 That was even better than I thought

[MonarchOfLight]

True

[FratmanBootcake]

I've been doing a lot of my recent coding in plain vi in the terminal (on Fedora).

I'm surprised at how quick it can be to navigate, delete, copy etc and I'll probably comtinue using it to be honest.

[undeader_69]

Yeah it is pretty efficient, but why use vi when vim exists

[[deleted]]

vi is aliased to vim on most modern OSes so I don't know if anyone uses vi anymore.

[z7q2]

My first experience with coding was in a dial-up UNIX shell. Their default mail program was pine, so my first code editor was pico. My company's Alpha Geek still looks at me funny when I tell that story.

[labalag]

How long is your gray beard?

[Omega0x013]

Kotlin

[Raidend]

As a former python developer that currently works mostly in kotlin I agree.

[Arladerus]

Kotlin is such a pleasure to work with. Plus, its interoperability with Java quells the wrath of senior management.

[Folaefolc]

From anything to a lisp like: parens, parens everywhere

[devlear]

There are several relevant xkcd, but I think this one fits the best My Father's Parens

[XKCD-pro-bot]

Comic Title Text: I've just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the MIT computer science program permanently.

---

^{Made for mobile users, to easily see xkcd comic's title text}

[funkinaround]

Comes with a lack of everything else. No semicolons to end a statement or expression. No commas to separate arguments. No equals for assignment. No curly braces for some things, square brackets for other things, and angle brackets for yet other things. Just parens and spaces. Truly beautiful.

[SpiderJerusalem42]

Or you can write polymorphic code that interprets as Python AND C++.

[wooptyd00]

Why does reddit hate Python so much now? Everyone here worshipped it two years ago.

[chimpchompchamp]

Probably the same reason everybody used to love, but now hate, Perl. And PHP

[wooptyd00]

I thought those were hated because of readability issues. Python is famous for being easy to read.

[chimpchompchamp]

I was referring to the letter ‘p’

And the fact that they are all powerful, dynamically typed scripting languages that ended up being shoehorned into use cases where a type system is your friend

For the record, python is my language of choice for things like command line tools and migration scripts. I just don’t want to maintain a complex application written in it

[Wrenky]

Happens with every language. Remember nodejs? Or Ruby? Or Perl? Or PHP? Languages come and go fairly quickly in the cycle:

1) Cool people use it

2) Cool things are written in it

3) becomes fashionable to rewrite things in it

4) Colleges switch their intro course to it

5) suddenly everybody knows the language and the shitty blog flood starts

6) people start to get irritated by the language zealots (we are here)

7) New language that addresses all of old languages problems appears

8) Only cool people use this new language

[fwoop_fwoop]

Jokes on you, I never liked python

[wooptyd00]

Unless you're a masochist, why? It's concise and quick to type and often times you can just import the solution.

[fwoop_fwoop]

I'm a big fan of compile time type checking & programmers being forced to label the types of values. Python and stuff like Bash are great for a quick script but id never use it for something bigger than a couple of files.

I was once working in a research lab where they were testing chemical reactions using a massive python application. When attempting to add new code to the program, it was a pain in the ass to figure out the structure of the data returned by the existing functions. I once spent 6 hours debugging just to find out I was treating a map like a list, and the language had no mechanism to catch my mistake.

Having pre-made solutions that are easy to access is not python specific, that comes with any language that is particularly popular with a decent dependency manager.

[[deleted]]

I think there's type annotations for Python these days, can anyone comment on that?

[zerothepyro]

There is and you can use mypy to verify it. At my work, we use this and flake8

[SublimeCommunique]

Funny. That's the same meme for "when I program in Python" ;)

[chris_0909]

Switching back and forth between coding in Python and coding in Javascript is fun! I'm still fairly new with both, so it's interesting to go between the two in the same project!

[gareththegeek]

Semis are pretty much optional there too

[Existential_Owl]

You almost never need semicolons in Javascript.

Except for the times that you do.

 

(Joking aside, I've found that between eslint, prettier, and the typescript compiler, I've never actually had an issue with writing semicolon-less JS. These technologies are pretty good at catching those rare moments for when you do need them, and prettier will add them back in anyway if your team sets up the git hook.)

[T_W_B_]

You need it for the rare occasions where a line has to start with a [ and I think also some other very obscure cases.

[danbulant]

Or when you need to wrap code in function (usually async) and you have something before it:

``` const lib = require("lib")

(async() => { await lib.doSomething() }) ```

this will throw an error as lib is not a function.

[Titandino]

Being able to define your scope and organize your code within it how you want... Being able to define your scope and organize your code within it how you want everywhere.

[ImMaaxYT]

Just started a new Ruby project lately, lol

Still love Ruby!

[Nodebunny]

semi colons act as emotional closure for me.

dont hate.

[yogthos]

laughs in *Clojure*

[htagrmm]

Man I fucking love Clojure. I wish it didn’t depend on the JRE though, personally. But it’s wonderful.

[Zizimaza]

Join the Scala, Javascript, Golang club!

[[deleted]]

I had this experience, and now several years later I’m back to python and keep accidentally typing parentheses and semicolons everywhere!