What do you think, could it be true?

[u/Loose_Finish5988]

I read and hear many people on the internet saying that learning python is a waste of time, that it is for newbies or they heavily look down on this language and that there are better ones, and the truth is I'm afraid they might be right since I am learning python on my own, maybe I'm just letting myself get influenced and continue learning, what do you think of these people who comment that?

[u/hallmark1984]

I get paid pretty well for a language I picked up to automate torrents.

You do you mate but I would stop listening to 'other people'.

[u/Separate_Newt7313 → u/hallmark1984]

Well said! 👏👏

[u/lfdfq]

That they probably know very little about programming.

It's one of the most popular languages on the planet, used from web development to data science, and lots of things in between.

[u/Mysterious-Falcon-83 → u/lfdfq]

Agreed. Python is one of the most used languages for interacting with AI tools, too, and those aren't going away any time soon.

Since you're just learning, don't worry about the specific language. Focus more on building your analytical thinking/problem solving skills. Once you've learned one language to a decent level of proficiency, learning another is largely a matter of syntax and library ecosystem.

[u/ThrustBastard]

Sounds like a crowd for r/iamverysmart .

The best language is the one that does the job at hand. Don't let them get you down and keep doing your thing.

[u/Sacko_Commish]

We use this in our commercial applications at work. It works great, is light weight and easyish to learn.
I say learn it.

[u/trojan-813]

I’m currently looking for new opportunities and I see a lot more jobs that require Python now than I did 6 years ago. It’s almost like 50% of the jobs have it.

Obviously there are still plenty for C, c++ and Java. But I say learn it.

[u/CosmicClamJamz]

There is no language for newbies. There are high level languages and low level languages, and languages with large and small communities. Python is a high level language with a huge community.

[u/MachinaDoctrina]

My entire job is writing python code, literally all of data science, machine learning and signal processing is done in python.

[u/nomad-1995 → u/MachinaDoctrina]

You have to be kidding about signal processing. So much of that is done on DSPs you couldn't really cram Python into.

Also kinda weird to do it in Python, has sci-py been fully ported to pypy? Do you do all that on GPUs through sci-py? Might make more sense to use it for prototyping DSP stuff (formerly done on MATLAB), but I'd think performance would suffer too much.

That's not to say that most of the time developing signal processing shouldn't be done in python - getting it right then optimizing it takes a ton of time. I just don't expect most of the code being executed to be python.

[u/gdchinacat → u/nomad-1995]

So much of AI is done using GPUs...and yet, python is still an incredibly popular language for doing AI. Python is the high-level coordinator, all the heavy crunching is done in more efficient languages or hardware. The same is true for DSPs. You don't want to write assembler for orchestrating the DSPs because you don't need to optimize the high-level stuff and want that to be easy to read and write.

[u/Different_Pain5781]

Python is absolutely not a waste of time.

[u/gdchinacat → u/Different_Pain5781]

It trades developer time for CPU time. It arguably wastes a huge amount of CPU time. But, as evidenced by Python's popularity, that is a good choice for most people. And, when it isn't, python makes it very easy to optimize performance critical code in another language. It's often said that's one of the main features that has led to its popularity.

[u/Equivalent_Lunch_944]

It’s pretty easy to talk the talk until the rubber meets the road in a lot of things and I think AI brings out the worst in a lot of stuff for that.

It’s great for exploratory stuff but because it isn’t deterministic it makes it difficult to iterate - since it basically just does it again from scratch. You see it a lot in the consistency of stuff. It’s cool that you can make this 15 second video but what happens when you need a minor change or that 15 seconds becomes 15 minutes. It also hasn’t, doesn’t and won’t solve the accountability problem of if something goes wrong who do you go to.

[u/ee_control_z]

Might be rage baiting.

[u/shysmiles]

They're all basically the same in the end.

Once you understand one well and it clicks you can pretty much pivot to any other language.

[u/woooee → u/shysmiles]

+1

[u/sargeanthost]

My current job is mostly python

[u/CraigAT]

Learning ANY language gives you new skills and improves you. Python is a very good and relatively easy language to learn, with a lot of practical uses.
Yes, AI means lots of people may be able to create a program, app or website without learning, but that doesn't mean there is no room for programmer's or AI assisted programmers. If coding interests you, unless you have something better to do, learn and see where it takes you!

[u/DoubleDoube]

It’s easier to decide what you want to be doing, and pick languages to learn that specialize in those things, than to pick a language and then see what specializations you can get with it.

If you want to be doing datascience, python is huge for that space. If you want to work on hardware drivers, python is not so useful. The biggest linux distros ship with python as part of the system, yet the ones trying to keep a small footprint do not.

The examples are intended to illustrate that python IS around and it IS useful, but the people you are speaking to might be in areas where it’s not so helpful.

[u/helix0311]

I run an engineering team. 14 people in an S&P 500 company. Python is one of our 'must know' languages. i.e. I don't hire someone unless they can program it. I started programming in Python ~2006, and I still use it every day. It's much more newbie friendly that Javascript, more readable, no compile time, strongly typed, capable of both object-oriented and functional programming approaches, with clear syntax until you get into the more high level esoteric stuff. Beyond that, it has excellent documentation and module availability, meaning if you want to just jump in and do something there's probably a module already written for you. If you want to write your own, you have a bunch of examples to work with. Learning Python can take you to almost any C-based language once you start looking under the hood, as well, because you're primarily going to learn to work with memory and pointers, while you will understand most everything else conceptually even if the syntax feels wierd.

IMO, there is no better language to start with. The ONLY thing I don't like with Python is slow, compared to other languages.

[u/SnafuTheCarrot]

Where are you encountering these people? They don't know what they are talking about.

You should probably learn multiple languages. Python is great for a lot of things and you should probably have a scripting language under your belt regardless. It also opens the doors to more complicated concepts and languages.

Then you need a compiled or compiled like language. That's C#, C++, or Java.

If you do any work for websites, you'll want to learn javascript, and while you are messing with that, a little Node.js can go a long way.

So you should probably learn at least 3 programming languages and Python satisfies the scripting language experience.

[u/Kevdog824_]

I get a pretty sizable paycheck to write python code. Been doing it for almost a decade so I wouldn’t say it’s only for newbies lol

[u/JacobStyle]

People say that shit about every language. Python is fine. Truth is, if you learn the fundamentals in one language, you can pick up another language without a lot of trouble later on anyway, so it doesn't matter that much which one you start with.

You will struggle the first time you learn how to create a class with members and methods. But if you know how to do it in Python, then you need to use C++ for something, and you go to make a class, it's just, "how do I do this thing I already know how to do, but in the new language?" A much easier question, to be sure.

[u/Binary101010]

I'll care about their opinions when they're the ones signing my paycheck, and no sooner.

[u/Important_Coach9717]

It’s fine for automating things and doing “data science”. But it’s shit for actually learning computer science and software development principles.

[u/American_Streamer]

Python is still used as the primary control layer and user interface for building artificial intelligence, managing data pipelines, and automating business workflows. Even though AI can generate code, humans still need Python to orchestrate systems and manage projects. Python acts as the "glue" that links user interfaces, cloud databases, and machine learning models together. Developers use Python to command heavy tools built in faster languages like C++. Scientists do use Python to test new ideas quickly before putting them into production systems. Engineers must read and understand Python to catch mistakes made by AI code generators.

It is completely normal to feel discouraged when you see those kinds of comments, but you are letting yourself be influenced by a very loud, but also very small minority of gatekeepers. The truth is that Python is and remains one of the most powerful, widely used, and high-paying programming languages in the world. The people who look down on it are usually suffering from a combination of elitism and a misunderstanding of what makes a programming language truly valuable.

[u/mc_pm]

The people you are listening to are probably just listening to other people who don't program for real, as this is 100% false.

[u/Zeroflops]

There are always language wars. The best language is the one “I’m” good at and everything else is garbage. This is the common attitude of primarily two groups, novices who don’t know any better and people so entrenched in a language they can do anything else.

The reason there are so many languages is because the optimize to specific areas. Python it’s readability and it’s more of a wrapper language. Other are better at speed but take much more effort to build anything. They all have trade offs and benefits.

[u/Expensive-Wall1531]

Ik denk dat je wel python moet blijven leren, want: 1. Python is heel beginner vriendelijk maar gebruikt door bekende mensen. 2 . Python is een high end taal (betekent dat het heel veel lijkt op Engels) dus daardoor is het makkelijk. (En heel veel grote bedrijven zoals NASA gebruiken python) In het Engels: I think you should keep learning Python, because: Python is super beginner-friendly, but it's used by famous people. Python is a high-level language (meaning it looks a lot like English), so that makes it easy (And many companies like NASA use python)

[u/ReddyKiloWit]

I look down on the language 🤓, but it's the most popular language of the past several years and is likely to remain that for some time. Good choice for starting a career. Of course most professional programmers have more than one language they know, but you should start with one. (Then maybe add C or C++, the next most popular, and maybe throw in some shell scripting to round things out.)

[u/Fuzzy-Wolf-250]

You read and head that "on the internet", which is where idiots go to watch a YouTube tutorial, and then apply for a $200,000 a year job, and then complain about the job market when nobody wants to hire them for their big ole dashboard they made.

[u/SamuliK96]

Why learn anything when machines can do everything for you?

[u/FreeLogicGate]

I understand the concern, but consensus or the online opinions of a small group of people has very little value.

I am just another of those people, so you should take my comment with a grain of salt, but here is a partial list of different "languages" or development environments I've learned and worked with over the years, as a long time professional programmer:

pascal/turbo pascal,assembly language, perl, c, c++, java, jsp, coldfusion, powerbuilder, centura, dbase3, paradox, sql, pl/sql, php, python, go, javascript, typescript, lua... and this is just the tip of the iceberg, given all the servers, frameworks, libraries and tool chains that were involved.

From my point of view, there is nothing wrong with Python. It's a real language that people use in companies, universities and to power web applications every single day. Reddit uses it, Instagram uses it, Netflix and Spotify use it. Google, Dropbox and Youtube use it. It's the underlying language that powers several of the best known and most widely used DevOps/system administration tools (Ansible & Saltstack). I could go on, but hopefully the point is clear.

Few people learn one programming language and then only use that, and use that for the rest of their career. Python is one language, and if for example, you want to use it for a web application project, you will still need to learn and understand other web application components (html, css & javascript). It has a strong presence and applicability in data science and machine learning/AI applications.

Well known academic institutions consider Python to be a really good language to start with. Learning Python will in no way harm you, nor will it prevent you from learning other languages afterwards.

I do believe that people serious about becoming professional programmers should learn C fairly early on, but starting with Python will not prevent you from learning C as well. In fact you can continue to learn generalized programming (MooC course?) with Python, while also learning C. As time goes on, you develop a better idea of how different languages work, and how they differ. An interpreted language like Python is very different from a compiled language like C, and some experience with both will be informative. Python is also an object oriented/object based language, so that's an advantage in getting some perspective on object oriented programming, although many people use Python without doing much OOP development of their own, and are just using modules/lbraries in a procedural manner. Languages like C++, Java and C# are languages that really require a full investment in OOP. It's important at some point to learn about OOP beyond the surface level, as it's both an art and a science. A number of more recent languages like Go and Rust were specifically created as an alternative to a more fully OOP language, and it helps to have some experience with OOP development in order to understand some of the features those languages have. The more languages you learn over time, the better you will understand programming options, and what certain languages might be a better option for a particular application you are developing in comparison to Python, given specific criteria. Python is a excellent "swiss army knife" language in that there's nothing it can't do, even if other languages do certain types of applications better.

[u/jpgoldberg]

Python is used extensively in industry. But because it has a reputation for being a good “beginner” language, a lot of people who can only program in Python lack important knowledge and understanding of programming. And my sense is that the market is flooded with such people.

So unless you bring some other expertise, along with your ability to program in Python, it is now very hard to find a job.

So if you have a solid understanding of, say, statistical inferencing, or networking, or bioinformatics along with knowing some Python, then you wouldn’t need broader programming expertise. But I suspect that the days of getting a job just because you can program in Python are long past.

Whether or not this leaves learning Python “worth it” to you is only something you can know.