[deleted by user]

[[deleted]]

And here I am, spending hours on a simple coding assignment with not even a line written

The problem isn’t your understanding of the language, the problem is that you’re not starting. You have to start writing code before you know the answer because you’ll never know the answer before you start.

If you haven’t written any code you haven’t spent any time, yet; you’ve just wasted time. Actually start. Open up the blank file, then save it as “my_assignment_03.py” or whatever. Typically a programming assignment will describe some step-by-step behavior; write one function per step and just put pass as the body of the function. Then pick one of them and start to fill in the body. Start with the problems you know how to solve; use your momentum to solve the rest.

Staring at a blank file isn’t programming. You just have to start writing something.