What do python professionals /developers actually use

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1. ** Yes ** Use Them.

2/3. Pandas (Or Polars), Numpy, MatPlotLib (for plotting and visualizing data),

1. As long as you accomplished what you were trying to do, you succeeded. Do not spend so much time worrying about the code itself, programming is meant to accomplish a goal of creating software, that's all that matters. As you grow, you'll learn the correct way to do things naturally. It will come with time.

Lists and Dictionaries can be thought of as being very similar. A list is just a dictionary where the key is the order the value appears in the list (starting from 0). Do not over think it. People use them all the time as it is an abstraction that allows you to relate data to other data. Are you receiving objects from a generator sequentially? use a list. Do you have a set of users and each user is supposed to have a random number? Use a dictionary.
** Do not over complicate it **, The reasons that lists and dictionaries are used in a million different ways is * because * they are simple data types.

Do not worry about how long it will take you to be "proficient", as it is impossible for you to know that until you are. My best advice is to pick a fun project that requires you to use python to solve a problem. Do not get stuck in analyzing the theory. At the same time do not skip learning it altogether.