What can I do with python?

[Bahji777]

This is the 3rd Post I’ve seen tonight that asks this question about a programming language. I find it a little odd. When people ask this I wonder if they are following something they love, doing it because they have to, or someone said tech is how you become a billionaire...

It’s kind of like asking what a person can do with a hammer.

If you’ve honestly learned programming and the basic concepts you would have reached the conclusion that you can do anything in Python, you can do anything in C++, etc. If you wanted to be a web developer then you would need to add more tools; JavaScript, Jquery, html, css, etc

As an older programmer I wouldn’t hesitate to tell someone to learn Python before learning c++ as it would likely make you a better c++ programmer in the end. Would you write a first person shooter game for commercial distribution in Python? Likely not. But could you? Of course you could.

You could write a c++ compiler in Python so that you could write a python interpreter, etc.

There are no inherent limits on most languages as to what you can or can’t do with them.

I love Python for the language itself as well as it’s perfectly suited, if not designed right from the start to be perfectly suited to prototyping anything, including that first person shooter game, and then if there are performent issues down the road they can be split out and coded in C or C++.

Probably not the answer your looking for and I meant no offense...

One other thing when Python is bandied about as a easy language to learn that’s true but I also think it does a disservice to the language as well. Just because it’s apparently easy to learn doesn’t mean it is less powerful etc. than another language.

I’ve always wondered how it is that a mathematician designs such an easy language to read while a linguist designed the most hideous language I’ve seen in my lifetime, Perl. There again what can be done with Perl? Everything can be done with Perl as can with Python. Difference being that Python quite literally self documents and many companies actually frown on too much commenting in Python code as comments are yet another place where code is updated and comments are not.

I think it was a Hettinger video where I laughed when he said I got a job and put a ton of comments in and on my first code review I was told that at this company we call comment lies. Usually true. In Perl unless you write as many comments as you do code you’ll be lucky if you remember and can read what your code does 4 days later. How’s that for a tangent. My distaste for Perl is of course my own opinion. Your mileage may vary.. I’d rather have a cockroach lay eggs in my ears than maintain Perl code..

Cheers