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by bluecalm
3987 days ago
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This post heavily resonate with my own experience. Specifically this: >>During my studies I learned C++. Personally I think that C++ is quite a challenging language for a beginner. I did get the occasional straight A but I wished that I would have started with an easier language I've took C++ course during my university days and that made me hate programming for years. The language is huge and full of things which beginner programmers shouldn't have to think about.
It was back in early days of the Internet so it was hard to find information. It was just too hard to me to comprehend why we need virtual/friend classes, bizarre constructors rules and why the code has all those strange symbols. The picture of programming I've got is a lot of boilerplate and little essence. We were coding simplistic calculators but the class hierarchy and all the nonsense had to be there. I've learnt Python as my first programming language several years after college (I dropped out; the reasons are many but one is that I really didn't enjoy the perspective of becoming a programmer and it was all just a chore) and my love for programming was resurrected. For me it was a web based programming game (http://www.pythonchallenge.com/) paired with a lot of googling but today it would probably be Code Academy (it wasn't available back then). What was really great about the experience is that I was coding fun things like automatic downloaders, simple image generators and a (again very simple) web crawler after a week of it. I didn't need to care about arcane language constructs at all. I've learnt C few years after that and today I do successful commercial project in C and most of the auxiliary programming (accounting, hobby projects, quick scripts etc.) in Python.
The negative experience with C++ was so strong I don't touch the language to this day. Programming gives me a lot of joy and C++ was close to killing it forever. While it's a stronger sentiment than the author expresses I have the same advice for people just starting: Go with Python and have fun! |
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Fast forward a number of years, and I'm an engineer working in a plant. I need to get some analysis done, and Excel just ain't cutting it. Somehow I happen upon pandas and IPython, and it's magic. I remember building classes for calculating vectors and such in high school, full of pointer nonsense and terrifying piles of boilerplate. (You haven't lived until you're a newbie attempting to code a templated class that makes doing physics look like an ordinary equation - you'd think it's easy, and it is! Right until it ain't.)
And now? I open up localhost:8888 and spin up a new Python kernel. Within seconds I am importing opencv and doing stuff I couldn't dream of in high school. And it's fast! I lost years from the discouragement of fighting linkers and arcane syntax errors. Intellectually gratifying sometimes, but ultimately not worth starting in. Accomplishing real work early counts for a lot.
Never mind that the curriculum attempted to switch to Java in our third year in high school. We all rebelled and won, and I feel like we dodged a bullet there.