Some people think that because Python is the easiest language to learn, it’s going to be easy to learn programming with Python. But learning programming is still very hard, so many abstract concepts to grasp. Python just makes it a tiny less hard, almost insignificantly now that we can use an LLM to learn the syntax faster than than ever.

This a much better done meme

The other one before makes zero sense

This is why I decided to learn Nix. I built dev environment flakes that provision the devshell for any language I intend to use. I actually won’t even bother unless I can get something working reliably with Nix. ;)

For example, here’s a flake that I use for my Python dev environment to provide all needed wiring and setup for an interactive Python web scraper I built:

{
  description = "Interactive Web Scraper";

  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs?ref=nixpkgs-unstable";
    utils.url = "github:numtide/flake-utils";
  };

  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, utils }: utils.lib.eachSystem ["x86_64-linux"] (system: let
    pkgs = import nixpkgs { system = system; };
  in rec {
    packages = {
      pyinputplus = pkgs.python3Packages.buildPythonPackage rec {
        pname = "pyinputplus";
        version = "0.2.12";
        src = pkgs.fetchPypi {
          inherit pname version;
          sha256 = "sha256-YOUR_SHA256_HASH_HERE";
        };
      };

      pythonEnv =
        pkgs.python3.withPackages (ps: with ps; [ webdriver-manager openpyxl pandas requests beautifulsoup4 websocket-client selenium packages.pyinputplus ]);
    };

    devShell = pkgs.mkShell {
      buildInputs = [
        pkgs.chromium
        pkgs.undetected-chromedriver
        packages.pythonEnv
      ];

      shellHook = ''
        export PATH=${pkgs.chromium}/bin:${pkgs.undetected-chromedriver}/bin:$PATH
      '';
    };
  });
}

Python is just a pile of dicts/hashtables under the hood. Even the basic int type is actually a dict of method names:

x = 1
print(dir(x))
['__abs__', '__add__', '__and__', '__bool__', '__ceil__', '__class__', '__delattr__', '__dir__', ... ]

PS: I will never get away from the fact that user-space memory addresses are also basically keys into the page table, so it is hashtables all the way down - you cannot escape them.

I find Python easy to just code a prototype with. But I find Rust easier to get right.

Reject modernity

Return to C

Good meme. However I do think that most people starting out will not really have to deal with any of those issues in the first few years apart from maybe the pip/venv/poetry/etc choice. But whatever they’ll pick it’ll probably work well enough for whatever they’re doing. When I started out I didn’t use any external libraries apart from pygame (which probably came pre-installed). I programmed in the IDLE editor that came with Python. I have no idea how I functioned that way, but I learnt a lot and hat plenty of fun.

Man, the variable scoping thing is insidious. It will never not be weird to me that ifs and loops don’t actually create a new scope.

And then you try to do a closure and it tells you you didn’t import anything yet.

Sooo… switch to Perl then? 😜

Python 3.13 is adding support for removing GIL, via PEP 703