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> And yet the number of times I've seen beginners completely discouraged or even give up programming forever because they have conda and pip and brew and pyenv
by Alex3917 8y ago
> And yet the number of times I've seen beginners completely discouraged or even give up programming forever because they have conda and pip and brew and pyenv installed and can't run a basic script after 4 hours of trying because environment mess-up is ridiculous.
Definitely true. Getting Python to run correctly is not only one of the hardest parts of learning to code, but comes right at the beginning so before people have experienced any success. It's gotten less bad in the last year or so thanks to pipenv, but it's still not a great situation.
- brownbat 8y ago> Getting Python to run correctly is not only one of the hardest parts of learning to code, but comes right at the beginning so before people have experienced any success. This is a surreal statement to read as someone who basically just writes and runs nearly pure Python in a text editor.
- Alex3917 8y ago> This is a surreal statement to read as someone who basically just writes and runs nearly pure Python in a text editor. Go help out at meetups for Python beginners and you'll see what I mean.
- Xeronate 8y agoSo does pretty much everyone. The problem is with setting up virtual environments and managing packages.
- talltimtom 8y agoSo much more harm than good is done trying to get new users to use virtual environments. Just get them started with straight up python, tell them that the solution to “couldn’t find X” is always just to type pip install X in a terminal and leave them to it. They’ll figure out the rest long before it becomes relevant and they won’t have need for it until long after they figure it out.
- dnautics 8y agoMy company's python backend refuses to deploy on my work laptop, so I don't program in python professionally anymore.