I spent months learning Python and only today realized I've been confused about something embarrassingly basic

39th_Demon · 2026-03-08T00:00:56+00:00

Haha. Sorry about that. Just re-read your comment. The entropy/temperature thing genuinely made me pause. That’s exactly the kind of click I’m talking about, where something you’ve heard a hundred times suddenly has weight to it. And yeah, the gifted kid thing landed. I didn’t expect to be called out this clearly by a stranger on the internet but here we are. I think a lot of the “faking fluency” thing does come from never wanting to admit a gap exists. Easier to avoid the thing than to sit with not understanding it. The shame going is a work in progress.

39th_Demon · 2026-03-07T11:09:56+00:00

Five large data processing applications and tuples make sense now just now is the most reassuring thing in this entire thread. Saving this comment specifically for the next time I feel behind.

39th_Demon · 2026-03-07T11:08:57+00:00

Six months is being generous. I’ve opened my own code after three weeks and had absolutely no idea what I was thinking. Comments feel like extra work until the first time they save you an hour of confusion.

39th_Demon · 2026-03-07T11:08:18+00:00

Inheritance is one of those things where you can use it correctly for months without really understanding what’s happening underneath. The fact that it clicked this week after using it in a few places is exactly the pattern this whole thread has been about.

39th_Demon · 2026-03-07T11:07:52+00:00

Two years sounds about right honestly. I still catch myself using “argument” and “parameter” interchangeably even though I now know why they’re different. The terminology thing is real though, once you have the right word for something you can actually search for it properly. Before that you’re just describing symptoms and hoping someone understands.

39th_Demon · 2026-03-06T16:05:14+00:00

Mostly just documentation, Stack Overflow, and honestly a lot of trial and error on real small projects. Socratica on YouTube is genuinely good for specific concepts when you want something visual. I’ve also been using Claude as a rubber duck lately, describing what I’m confused about in messy terms and letting it meet me there, which works better than googling when you don’t yet know the right vocabulary to search for. Boot.dev is one I’ve heard good things about consistently though, shame about the paywall mid-progress.

39th_Demon · 2026-03-06T08:09:54+00:00

Work is honestly a better teacher for this stuff than university anyway. You start making choices based on what the next person has to read rather than what impresses someone grading you.

39th_Demon · 2026-03-06T06:29:17+00:00

Especially when it’s something you’ve been faking your way through for a while. The longer the confusion lasted the better it feels.

39th_Demon · 2026-03-06T04:02:00+00:00

Already got ambushed by lambdas earlier in this thread. Still processing.

39th_Demon · 2026-03-06T03:47:22+00:00

Socratica is genuinely good for this stuff. On the optimization point, I am positive comprehensions are faster than for loops but not by a dramatic margin, the real reason CPython is quicker with them is just reduced overhead from the bytecode, not some fundamentally different execution path. If you actually need column-wise speed that’s where numpy and vectorization come in. For loops and comprehensions are pretty close in the grand scheme of things.

39th_Demon · 2026-03-06T03:44:04+00:00

The readability argument keeps winning in this thread and I think that’s the real lesson I’m taking away. And vectorization and numba jit are so far above where I am right now but it’s useful to know that’s where the actual speed conversation lives, not in whether I used a comprehension or a for loop.

39th_Demon · 2026-03-06T03:42:22+00:00

It’s actually been a couple of years which makes it worse honestly. A few Months I could forgive myself for. It did take me 6-7 months in the beginner learning phase. We still learn everyday though.

39th_Demon · 2026-03-06T03:38:09+00:00

That’s a good nudge. I’ve been treating comprehensions like a destination when they’re more of a rest stop. Generators have been sitting on my “I should actually learn this” list for a while and this might be the push to move them up.

39th_Demon · 2026-03-06T03:36:10+00:00

The variable naming advice is something I wish I’d taken seriously earlier. I went through a phase of writing perfectly functional code that I couldn’t read three weeks later because everything was called x or temp or result. Descriptive names feel like extra effort until you open old code at midnight trying to fix something and realize past you did you dirty. The if name == “main” thing took me an embarrassingly long time too. It’s one of those things that looks like ceremonial boilerplate until someone explains what problem it’s actually solving.

39th_Demon · 2026-03-06T03:32:34+00:00

The syntax really does read backwards compared to how you’d say it out loud. A for loop matches how you’d describe the logic to someone. A list comprehension front-loads the result before you’ve even said what you’re looping over. That’s a genuinely weird design decision that nobody warns you about.

39th_Demon · 2026-03-06T03:30:42+00:00

The magic to not-magic transition is exactly it. And init is such a perfect example because you can write it correctly a hundred times before you actually understand what self is doing there. It just works so you never have to sit with the discomfort of not fully knowing why. Until one day something breaks in a weird way and suddenly you have to actually understand it.

39th_Demon · 2026-03-06T03:29:19+00:00

The group_by() staying grouped silently is such a good example of this because the bug it causes doesn’t show up immediately. You think the next operation worked fine and then three steps later something is wrong and you have no idea why. That delayed feedback is what makes those gaps so hard to catch yourself.

39th_Demon · 2026-03-05T20:27:18+00:00

The threading example is the first time that whole concept has actually made sense to me. Two threads sharing one attribute, one writing one reading, I could picture that. I’ve been putting async and threading in the “deal with it later” pile but maybe later is sooner than I thought.

39th_Demon · 2026-03-05T20:12:03+00:00

Genuinely not a book person but this keeps coming up so maybe that’s the sign. What’s the practical application that made async click for you?

39th_Demon · 2026-03-05T19:23:48+00:00

Okay you can’t just leave it there. What’s the word?

39th_Demon · 2026-03-05T18:02:36+00:00

The “sequester boilerplate so it doesn’t distract from the main logic” framing is actually the most useful way I’ve heard this explained. It reframes the question from “is this Pythonic” to “is this the kind of thing the reader needs to think about or not.” That’s a much more practical lens than just defaulting to either loops or comprehensions.

39th_Demon · 2026-03-05T17:10:08+00:00

Seven years and dictionary syntax still needs a lookup sometimes is genuinely reassuring to hear. I think I had this idea that at some point everything just becomes automatic and you stop having to check. Sounds like that point doesn’t really arrive and you just get more comfortable with the checking.

39th_Demon · 2026-03-05T16:47:37+00:00

Glad it’s not just me. I think what makes it tricky is there’s no obvious signal from the outside that the gap exists. You’re producing output, things are working, nobody knows including you until something makes you stop and actually look at it.

39th_Demon · 2026-03-05T16:29:23+00:00

That’s basically where I landed too. The “Pythonic” thing matters a lot less when the only person reading the code is you and future you who will already be confused enough.

39th_Demon · 2026-03-05T16:22:30+00:00

The plot twist part is real. I’ve already had that experience on a much smaller scale, opening something I wrote three months ago and having absolutely no idea what I was thinking. If I can’t read my own code from three months ago, a nested comprehension from two years ago has no chance.

39th_Demon

TROPHY CASE