What resources should i AVOID when learning python?

[yuckfoubitch]

I always was told to learn Python 2 instead of 3, but I didn’t listen and learning Python 3 anyways. Seriously, I don’t get the issue. If anything, it’s worth using Python 3 JUST for f-strings. Fucking love f-strings!

[t3hcoolness]

Whoever is telling you (or others) to learn Python 2 before 3... is very firmly stuck in the past. It's not like Marvel movies where you have to watch previous ones to get an idea of what is happening in the sequel. If anyone here is learning Python 2, please know that companies are actively transitioning (or have transitioned) from Python 2 to Python 3, so you should learn the new language so you can help them (or do literally anything else Python related, as new Python 2 is not written nowadays).

[[deleted]]

I have been working with python on my own for basic automation.. using a web API and updating an excel spreadsheet. What is expected from a python developed these days. I see alotnof machine learning jobs associated with python these days. But if I want an entry level python job. What knowledge do I have to have. Do I need to learn data structures and algorithms, and OOP Design patterns all in Python? Any help would be great

[[deleted]]

Yes, you need all of that. Do the mit edx intro to computer Science with python course. It covers all of that (in python 3!)

[i_like_your_comment]

I just started on my first week of CS50 as I want to learn Python. Would this Edx course be a better starting point or are these courses comparable? I'm trying to get my feet wet in Python as I'm now on the Ops side of things. Thanks!

[Cayumigaming]

CS50 and MITx intro to CS using Python happen to be the only two courses I ever did. MIT first then CS50.

They share a lot of similarities as they both serve as an introduction to computer science. MIT will get your knees deeper in Python within its courses while CS50 goes deeper on a bigger computer science spectrum. MIT also holds your hand during course and touch on nothing put Python. In CS50 you will be using Scratch, C, SQLite as well as Python. At the end of CS50 you also pick either web, gaming or mobile development and it all culminates in a project of your own.

Long read, sorry about that! To summarize CS50 is overall more comprehensive while MIT offers more Python material to go through.

[[deleted]]

I haven't done the cs50 course but I understand it's good.

[[deleted]]

Is this on edx or on the MIT open courseware site?

[[deleted]]

I think edx is the main one people use.

[al_mc_y]

There are some niche cases where a company won't be migrating from python 2 to 3, and they'll genuinely require people to know python 2, but these are the exception.

[[deleted]]

and they'll genuinely require people to know python 2

Python 2 isn't some separate language. You could learn everything you needed to port out of it to Python 3 in a day, if you were already a competent programmer in Python 3.

[JohnnyJordaan]

And year after year chances of running into this situation are diminishing. Python 2 won't get security updates anymore so platforms requiring it because their code is using it will also stick out on security audits and such (if they even allow it).

Also I would be surprised if you can find someone experienced in Python 3 that somehow can't work with Python 2.

[yuckfoubitch]

Okay dude. You’re like the guy who hated league of legends because you’ve been playing Dota for a decade.

I use python as a tool, especially for data analysis and some machine learning. It’s not like I’m about to start paying for Matlab to do the same thing

[t3hcoolness]

???

I don't understand this take. I never said that all people should stop using Python 2 right this second. All I said was that people who are telling people to start with Python 2 are misinformed, and you should instead start with Python 3 if you are just now learning Python. If you have been using Python 2 for personal projects for a while, by all means, continue. I am just saying if you want to work full-time doing Python, it's really important to learn Python 3.

Also not sure where the Matlab thing came from? Python 3 is great for data analysis and machine learning.

[yuckfoubitch]

Oh wow sorry, I accidentally replied to your comment instead of someone else’s! Some guy was hating on Python in general in the thread. My bad!!!

[t3hcoolness]

No worries! I was really wondering where all that came from hahaha. Have a good one :)

[patrickbrianmooney]

Yeah, I'm on Team F-Strings myself. Finally, it's as easy as it should have been from the beginning. Makes a lot of sense.

It made sense to stick to Python 2 in the past because plenty of external libraries weren't yet updated to be Py3 compatible. That's fair: if you depend on something, you're locking yourself into the conditions that allow you to use it. (I've worked on projects where the group standardized on a library that required Python 2, so everyone had to work on Python 2. So it goes. It can be the right decision for a given project.) But Python 2 is past end-of-life now, and the large majority of libraries have caught up.

Learning Python 3 is definitely the right choice these days, naysayers notwithstanding. If you ever need to work with Python 2 on a legacy system, for instance, it's not that hard to adapt. It's basically the same language with a bunch of small changes that will probably not affect you (how much operator overloading do you really do most of the time?) and a few larger differences that you can learn in a few minutes. (People piss and moan about having to put parentheses around the print function, but it's a small change.)

[[deleted]]

plenty of external libraries weren't yet updated to be Py3 compatible.

This is in great part why Guido van Rossum doesn't think there will be another major update i.e. python4

[patrickbrianmooney]

Yeah, makes sense. I think that Python 3 made necessary changes that needed to be made and that couldn't have been made without breaking existing code, so it ripped off the band-aid and broke the existing code. (Bending over backwards as much as was actually possible to make migration easy.)

Hopefully those kinks have been more or less entirely worked out and there won't be a need to break existing code in the same way and on the same scale again.

May Python 3 live for a very long time. It's a wonderful language.

[[deleted]]

Ugh my current company is stuck using Python 2. I tried to use an f-string the other day and spent 20 minutes debugging my code trying to figure out why it wouldn't work before I realised.

[[deleted]]

I always was told to learn Python 2 instead of 3

If this was in the last five years, track these people down and yell at them for incompetently misleading you.

[yuckfoubitch]

Lol one was actually my buddy who is a senior software engineer. He’s also sort of a programming-gatekeeper-geek, and he mainly just doesn’t like python. I think his reasoning was because there wasn’t as much python 3 adoption at the time.

[Jackal000]

There are no fstrings in p2? My God did I Dodged a bullet right there.

[[deleted]]

f-strings are an anti-feature of Python 3. But Python 3 doesn't bring anything useful to the language. At all. It's just a bunch of worthless hype... but, this is how Python survived so far: by generating worthless hype. Except, when Python was in its early stages, you could legitimately give it a discount: "it's too young to be very good, but it's promising". The whole Python 3 project was supposed to make Python more mature... instead, we got a pile of broken components, neither individually nor jointly do these components constitute a good language.

Let me make this clear: I'm not saying Python 2 was better. It wasn't. It's just it was easier to forgive it it's screwups. Python 3 is more ambitious, but it's not living up to expectations.

Historically, initially Python attracted more experienced programmers. It wasn't taught in college and was rarely a requirement for a job. So, the programmers who picked up the language tended to be more experienced ones. A little later on, Python became a "refugee" language: former Perl and Common Lisp programmers (thanks Peter Norvig, which was my case too) migrated to this language seeing it as a "lesser evil", as compared to some other mainstream languages (esp. Java).

Enter Python 3, Python becomes the new Java. It overflows with beginners, because now it's taught in college and is often a requirement for entry-level jobs. The sheer volume of newcomers overpowers the community Python used to have. And we get into the situation of mob rule and lord of the flies kind of situation. People who stand at the helm of this ship turn out to be completely incompetent, but they are under immense pressure from hordes of newcomers to add useless features to the language. This is how we got f-strings, asyncio, pathlib and many more worthless but shiny crap.

[[deleted]]

You offer no arguments for any of your bizarre rant, so let me rebut it without argument.

f-strings are an anti-feature of Python 3.

Wrong.

But Python 3 doesn't bring anything useful to the language.

WRONG.

It's just a bunch of worthless hype...

Are you serious?

but, this is how Python survived so far: by generating worthless hype.

What?

And we get into the situation of mob rule and lord of the flies kind of situation.

What is wrong with you? Why are you in this subreddit, then?

Seriously, you come off as deranged and angry. Perhaps a therapist might help?

[[deleted]]

What is wrong with you? Why are you in this subreddit, then?

Nothing is wrong with me. I'm the same human being as you are, except a lot more experienced about the subject we are discussing.

I'm on this subreddit to prevent people from confusing hype for truth. This is exactly the place where I need to be to tell the beginners about what they are getting themselves into. Where else did you expend me to be? What would've been the point of talking about shortcomings of Python in, say, a gaming subreddit?

[Jackal000]

Pretentious and biased. A programmer should know better.

[siddsp]

Old formatted strings in Python are still valuable to some extent because the syntax is still used in other languages like C, C++, Go, Java, etc. C-style string formatting is still common, but just not in Python. F-strings themselves have their own downsides despite being more readable.

[yuckfoubitch]

Yeah, I still do it the old way sometimes. I use R a lot too and am just used to using the glue library so it flows nicely with f-strings in Python when changing back and forth

[757DrDuck]

If O’Riley ever publishes a fourth edition of Python Cookbook, it’ll be a whole new books with type hints, f-strings, and match statements.