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Comment by wiseowise | Hacker News Reader

> I don't see why you would need to use decorators, generators or anything? You don't need to learn control flow, functions, variables, etc.

I think the point here, is that when beginners start exploring what's out there in "professional" lands they'll quickly discover that they don't know Python at all, because they were using this primitive subset of a language.

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But in what language is that not true? You start learning any language by pieces, and just because you know 10% of the language doesn't mean you're ready to write it professionally, this is true for any language.

> and just because you know 10% of the language doesn't mean you're ready to write it professionally

I don't see why not. Plenty of folks learn on the job, including new languages, and the way things work out you might end up implementing some things sort of by kitbashing, knowing relatively little of the concrete details that you end up learning completely more later on. I do this all the time.

At what percentage of knowledge are you ready to use the language professionally?

> But in what language is that not true?

go, but that brings along its own set of bug bear problems

To compare, let's look at C. At "only" a couple hundred pages, the C language spec is simple enough. The language doesn't have all those fancy things like decorators, pattern matching, lambdas, etc.

But after 30 years of programming, do I actually know C? Once I dig into C compilers, undefined behaviors, etc. I can also quickly convince myself I actually don't know C at all...

But you always start by using a primitive subset of a language.

But that’s so exciting! More frontiers to explore!!

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