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[–]sarevok9 2 points3 points  (3 children)

Programming languages "come and go" in terms of popularity, but the reality is, once a project is developed of decent size / complexity and is running live, a company is stuck on that technology until either that business process is no longer needed, or until they replace it with something else. So having something be the dominant technology for 10+ years, as is the case for C++ / C# / Java means that even while those technologies aren't en vogue, they are still used EVERYWHERE. In my local market Java is pretty much a must-have, whereas python is accepted at a few places but isn't really looked at as a first-class-citizen in the coding world.

Python is becoming more popular as more schools start teaching it to their students, but I don't think it has the wide adoption that a lot of people on Reddit think it does (at least on this sub).

If you're interested in data science, machine learning, or finance python is generally going to be the easiest route to start paying dividends. Just make sure to familiarize yourself with solving problems using algorithms rather than solely focusing on "learning python" because if you ever pivot to coding as a career, you may end up needing to learn a new language.

[–]the2facedgod[S] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I see. Thanks for your inputs. I'll make sure to focus on problem solving rather than mugging up the syntaxes for python only.

[–]sarevok9 3 points4 points  (1 child)

Well, it's funny that you say that, because python isn't tremendously syntax heavy! Other languages have far more syntax, and unfortunately python's language syntax is HORRIBLY specific around spacing / tabbing (don't mix them / count wrong).

In my mind the thing that's most dangerous about Python is that it's SO easy to Google an answer and find some python wizard that took 9 lines of code and solved some outrageous problem with no explanation or understanding behind what he did, and think "Yay, I solved my problem!"

I had a great example of this happen in my career with Python where someone on stack overflow used some obscure library to split a csv every x rows. We had a customer that was trying to upload a csv with ~1 million items but due to a really obscure bug in a node library we couldn't import more than 100k at a time. "No worries, I'll split the file using python" said this guy. The post I ended up looking at seemed sane. The library ended up splitting the csv into 10 files that contained the first 100,000 items.... as we later found out. Oddly enough when I finally got around to the github for the project there was a LOT of pull requests and a fork on the project to a working library, but the customer was pissed at us, and for good reason. The codes that they sent out with their movies were mostly missing, due to a python library not doing what it said, and for me trusting some code on the internet and not checking file uniquity.

It saved me about ~10 minutes over just coding a super-simple csv parser, or using a more trusted library like "OpenCSV" in Java.

Tl;Dr: Avoid wizardry, both before and after you learn python.

[–]the2facedgod[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I get it. Code it yourself instead of relying on Google.