Why You Should Learn Python – G’d Up Code

Why Python is awesome and you should at least give it a try.

My first encounter with Python was a part of the introductory course to programming. Well, I actually played with it on my own before, so I already was familiar with its syntax when the course began, but I didn’t do any real project in it before that course. Even though I thought it’s a great language to introduce people to programming, I wasn’t a big fan of it. It’s not that I disliked the language, it was more of a “meh” attitude. The reason was simple: there was “too much magic”. Coming from a background of languages such as C an Java, which are a lot more explicit in terms of what’s going on under the hood, Python was the complete opposite of that.

Another issue was that Python seemed a lot less structured: writing large, complex programs seemed to be a tougher task to achieve than, for example in Java, where you have some strict rules when it comes to the structure of the program (for instance the one public class per file rule), Python on the other hand, gives you a lot more freedom in such things.

Another thing is strict typing and debugging: since Python is an interpreted language, finding bugs wasn’t as easy: if you have a syntax error in C, the program will simply not compile, on the other hand, in interpreted languages, the problem might go unnoticed for quite some time, until the execution reaches that particular line of code. Trying to pass a string where an integer is expected? cc will go crazy at you, while Python’s interpreter won’t mind at all (there are some tool that address that problem though, like mypy, but I’m talking about vanilla Python). What I just mentioned here is a general downside of interpreted languages and are not exclusive or particular to Python, but those were some of the main reasons of my initial attitude towards it.

Source: Why You Should Learn Python – G’d Up Code

 

Raony Guimaraes