I’m a retired Unix sysadmin. Over the years I’ve built things in COBOL, FORTAN, C, perl, rexx, PHP, visual basic, various Unix shells and maybe others. Nothing has been a real “application” - mostly just utilities to help me get things done.
Now that I’m retired, and it’s cold outside, I’m curious to try some more coding - and I have an idea.
The music communities here seem to post links to YouTube. I generally use Lemmy on my phone but don’t use YouTube, or listen to music, on my phone if I can help it. I’d like to scrape a music community here and add the songs posted to a playlist in my musicbrainz account.
Does that sound like a reasonable learner project? Any suggestions for language and libraries appreciated. My preferred IDE is vim on bash and I have a home server running Linux where this could run as a daemon, or be scheduled.
I’m a little determined to stick with Python because I feel that I should - everyone should be able to code Python :-)
The main problem I have with it is the complex, relaxed, data structures. I’m finding that the type() command in interactive mode is helping a lot. I’m having lots of moments like - “Ah, I’m not down to the dict yet, I’m still in the list…”
The way that I see it is that some languages will “click” while others may not. Nothing wrong with that. I like your determination!
I’d say, from your stated problem, that you may be selling yourself short a bit. My colleagues and I frequently run into the same when debugging. And the approach that you are using to work through it is exactly what I’d recommend as well (along with type hinting). I also find the Python interactive shell great for testing concepts and do one-off things that are easier in Python than Bash.