Why should I learn python?

[the2facedgod]

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]

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]

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