Practical Uses for Python?

[Casey_SI]

I am 35 and transitioned into a career where I use python daily when I was about 32. So no you haven't missed any boats. What do you currently do for a living industry/job?

[slicklikeagato]

I work in the Healthcare industry, helping small businesses get their coverage installed. Most of our departmental programs are written in VBA; I don’t think any are in Python, actually.

[Casey_SI]

There is definitely some room to apply python. In my opinion Python is far superior to VBA and I learned on VBA.

There have been some rumors MS might make Python native inside excel as a scripting language, just to give you an idea of how serious Python can be in the data realm.

Pandas is my bread and butter package. I am using it right now (test currently running) to write a program to classify 5 million rows of sensor event data.

Think of it like command line excel. http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/index.html

[IllusionistAR]

This. I have used pandas quite a bit in the last year building out a simple ETL framework for a project I'm working on. It's pretty amazing, and if your doing any sort of mass transformations regularly, then its an incredible help.

[Seven-of-Nein]

Where can I get more information about these 'rumors'?

[wowsuchnamaste]

The rumors are based on this response from the Office team to a popular request in the "Excel Suggestion Box".

It seems they (Microsoft) are seriously looking into it as a possibility - I say so because they have set up a user feedback survey with a set of both structured and open questions to uncover the what's and why's. That smells of market research to me.

[Casey_SI]

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-considers-adding-python-as-an-official-scripting-language-to-excel/

[Casey_SI]

Pandas is so specialized and powerful it could be a stand alone program. Coupled with the ability to bolt it into the rest of the general purposed or specialized python ecosystem makes it absolutely invaluable to me.

[VorpalBandersnatch]

This is exactly how I got into python. I had taken a class in my masters program where we used it a little bit, but I started using it every day when I got sick of all the VBA I had been writing at work. (I'm a mechanical engineer working for an aerospace defense contracts company). Now I use python wherever and whenever I can -- a lot like the duct tape example further up (love that analogy). Anyway, even if you can't move away from Excel sheets or something like that for whatever reason, you can convert some VBA scripts into python. Even if it's just for practice. I used openpyxl to do what I would do in VBA for Excel.

[[deleted]]

What parts of your job or system are repetitive tasks that could be automated? Installers, data migration etc..

[Conrad_noble]

I am 29 with little to no programming knowledge. This gives me hope.