Relearning python, part 9: Conclusions

Relearning python has been an enlightening and exciting exercise.  It has, without a doubt, made me a better programmer.  It’s exposed me to things like unit testing, and better documentation practices, that I probably would have continued to avoid with C#.  It exposed me to alternative UI frameworks with different concepts.  I’ve learned to simplify my coding by letting go of total control, it made me realize how much of the code I wrote was only to prevent things that I could just choose not to do.  I could feel new neural pathways in my brain being created, and a constant sense of discovery and exploration as I understood what ‘pythonic’ really means.

But it has also been incredibly frustrating.  Python is supposed to be a simple and elegant language that should be easy for beginners.  It isn’t, because the ‘one way to do something’ mantra of the language doesn’t carry over to actually using the language.  Choice is the enemy of the novice.  Every single interaction outside of the language requires the user to make some decision- and there is often no ‘best choice.’

1. Which version of python?  2.7 or 3.2?  She may not find out until she finds some extension she needs that isn’t supported in what she’s using.
2. Environment variables are not something people are born knowing how to use.  I did a fair bit of programming without having to fuck with environment variables, thankyouverymuch.  Python loves them.
3. What IDE?  Do you know how long it takes to properly evaluate an IDE?
4. What GUI framework?
5. What happens when you start to need things that don’t come with python?  Like, a vector math library.  Or anything that has 40+ modules available on pypi.
6. Christ, some pretty good modules don’t even have goddamn binary installers.  Now you’re going to ask a novice to download and compile python and C files?  Most people couldn’t guess what GCC stands for.
7. Many IDE’s don’t have competent intellisense.  Sothe ability to determine what to type means you have to look things up in the docs.  Or worse, people write big procedural programs, because it speeds things up to have intellisense.
8. As they get into more complex frameworks, they have a ton of choices- what to build a service with?  What to build a website with?  All these frameworks have a steep rampup, and unfortunately some of the ones she will choose may have less than friendly documentation.

Let’s compare this to the experience of a novice in C#.  Install VS Express (newest version of .NET will also be installed, and no worries about backwards compatibility).  Use WPF for UI and XNA for graphics stuff.  A dll is all you need to make use of a component- and most .NET dlls are compatible on any Windows machine, so you can usually find binaries, or it is at least much easier to compile .NET code than it is C/python code (you can stay off the fucking commandline).  Intellisense everywhere.  Microsoft for everything.

There is no comparison here.  C#/.NET is, hands down, a better setup for novice users, and I’d say professional users as well.  On Windows.  The work involved in becoming a proficient python programmer seems to have more to do with understanding how to navigate the boatloads of shit in the ecosystem swamp, and becoming really fucking smart. .NET treats programmers as if they were as dumb and transient as application users, python treats them as if they were all as smart and dedicated as Linux users.

It is a bit scary in many ways, and I don’t really know enough about the python community (obviously) to say whether this should be considered a problem.  But there is certainly a real deficiency, and one that people are discussing.