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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

I still don't get why Python is considered "easy to learn" as a first programming language, even to the point of coding professionally in it. There are many things about Python that are extremely obscure and that a complete novice can only really hope to work around clumsily, not deal with in a principled way. That's frankly a big turnoff even compared to archaic but somewhat simple and understandable systems, including BASIC.

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I'm a heavy Python user, and have worked with a number of colleagues who have learned it as their first language in my group. And BASIC was my first language.

I think Python is easy to use as a scripting language thanks to the proliferation of libraries, meaning that you can get things done without touching the obscure stuff. Many users can be quite productive with precisely the subset of Python that's not too different from BASIC. Python adds features faster than I can learn them, and though I'm a productive user, I scored "average" on a skills test.

Very good points. My Python skills are such that I would be laughed out of a Python job interview for hilarious incompetence, but the small subset of the language I know and am comfortable with has allowed me to automate all sorts of tasks and saved me an enormous amount of time over the years. What I love about Python is the great spectrum of possibilities with it over quite a range of skill levels!

Where my skills lack are in areas that just aren't relevant to my work. The quiz had a lot of questions about the testing infrastructure. Whereas I use Python mostly in Jupyter notebooks, and for laboratory automation.

Still, I'm going to take a refresher course next year. I don't want to be the guy who's teaching Python without knowing it.

When Python picked up that reputation it was considerably smaller, with the likes of Java and C++ as the most prominent competition. Also it's easy to think that newer fancier features added over time don't really matter for learnability, since the old style mostly still works; but they do matter some, since when you make a mistake, the interpreter doesn't know that you had no intention of straying from a simpler sublanguage.

At basic linear scripting level it is pretty simple. Import stuff, write code, run it.

But when you get to structuring it whole thing feels quite hacky and weird in places. Like why do I have this empty file here(__init__.py). Or what is the whole point of this "__main__" thing. Two examples of most basics ways of building a more complicated program and both are quite weird.

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