4 ms·

Can you expand on what you think has become difficult and what you recommend now?

by wDcBKgt66V8WDs 8y ago

jerf 8y ago
The big problem is when the beginner first encounters some external code. One particular case was trying to teach a QA automation engineer about what was going on. First of all, I was having trouble tracing back all the definitions involved due to the excessive "cleverness" involved in assembling the API, but we'll put that down to the testing API doing things it shouldn't. The problem I had was that I had to explain "oh, well, this is a generator because of the yield, and the arguments don't show up in the documentation for the function because it's introspecting on the keywords you pass in dynamically, and this here is a generator comprehension with its own syntax, and this is what the decorator on top is doing on this code, which is why this is breaking" and honestly it kept going like that for a while. When it all worked it was fine, but when anything broke, it's become far too easy in Python, and arguably idiomatic Python, to erect a rather intimidating wall of features and automatic rewirings and fancy decorators and suddenly to fix their problem the novice is swallowing all of twenty years of language development in one shot... or they give up and do something else. I don't have a current go-to recommendation, though I've found myself recommending "Go but stay away from any concurrency features for a good long time" a few times. Ignoring all the other controversies that HN likes to indulge in, that's not a half-bad intro to "real programming" for a modern language. It's not the only good choice, of course.
- wDcBKgt66V8WDs 7y ago
  Ah interesting. I totally hear that. Your idea of a beginner is someone in a mature environment though, I guess my thought when I read your previous comment was a total beginner starting from a blank slate.

4 ms·

Can you expand on what you think has become difficult and what you recommend now?

by wDcBKgt66V8WDs 8y ago

Can you expand on what you think has become difficult and what you recommend now?

jerf 8y ago
The big problem is when the beginner first encounters some external code. One particular case was trying to teach a QA automation engineer about what was going on. First of all, I was having trouble tracing back all the definitions involved due to the excessive "cleverness" involved in assembling the API, but we'll put that down to the testing API doing things it shouldn't. The problem I had was that I had to explain "oh, well, this is a generator because of the yield, and the arguments don't show up in the documentation for the function because it's introspecting on the keywords you pass in dynamically, and this here is a generator comprehension with its own syntax, and this is what the decorator on top is doing on this code, which is why this is breaking" and honestly it kept going like that for a while. When it all worked it was fine, but when anything broke, it's become far too easy in Python, and arguably idiomatic Python, to erect a rather intimidating wall of features and automatic rewirings and fancy decorators and suddenly to fix their problem the novice is swallowing all of twenty years of language development in one shot... or they give up and do something else. I don't have a current go-to recommendation, though I've found myself recommending "Go but stay away from any concurrency features for a good long time" a few times. Ignoring all the other controversies that HN likes to indulge in, that's not a half-bad intro to "real programming" for a modern language. It's not the only good choice, of course.
- wDcBKgt66V8WDs 7y ago
  Ah interesting. I totally hear that. Your idea of a beginner is someone in a mature environment though, I guess my thought when I read your previous comment was a total beginner starting from a blank slate.