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Comment by BerislavLopac | Hacker News Reader

As the old saying goes, "Python is the second best language for everything."

I embraced the fact that I know only one programming language at a decent level and it is Python. Rather trying to convince people that "I am a programmer", I convinced myself that, "I can solve problems through programming". I just love solving problems. No matter how hacky or stupid my solution is, it gets me from point A to point B. For many "programmers" doing things right gets in the way of doing things.

> Rather trying to convince people that "I am a programmer", I convinced myself that, "I can solve problems through programming".

Why?

Pretty good approach. When Python was my main and only language, I had an ungodly amount of unnecessary imposter syndrome stemming from that.

The fact is this, many of Python programmers know nothing. What they do is import library and "solve problems".

No, it's not the kind of "problems" that real programmers do ;)

I have some bad news about programmers in every other mainstream language.

This confusion arises because “programming” is a broad, poorly-defined term. There are plenty of examples of projects which foundered because someone did what you described OR the inverse, because the underlying program is some combination of mismatched skills, incentives, and situations. There are people who’ve generated more business value with a labyrinthine Excel workbook than a room full of “real programmers”, and it’s always worth considering why.

Which really means “Python is a nice interface to whatever optimized code you’ll need to run.”

After LISP, sh, TCL, and Lua all took a run at that fence, I'm glad something finally cleared it.

cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34431984

Python is the language you want to write code in. Anything but Python is the language you want everyone else to use.

I ameliorate this somewhat with strict CI/CD rules. Black + ruff + mypy can help keep Python sane.

mypy still has some rough edges but in a couple years it’s going to be golden. My Python programs are already always fully typed and checked with strict settings. For all intents and purposes that’s 95% of the way of what a statically typed language provides anyway (if we ignore multithreading).

This article had a good impact on how I do typing nowadays (applies to any language): https://dusted.codes/the-type-system-is-a-programmers-best-f...

ha, I did not know ruff, used pylint until now.

https://pypi.org/project/ruff/

Not for mobile apps, where the second-best language to use is TypeScript

That would be Dart.

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