I hate Python

Versatility, ease during learning, comprehensiveness- these are the words people often use as they are trying to convince you why Python is the best programming language for beginners.

I wouldn't say I liked Python. I hated the "readable" syntaxes. I was not too fond of the fact that it tried its best to mimic the English language. I hated the fact that it did not have any brackets or semicolons. I hated recoding parts of a program just because I accidentally pressed the spacebar twice. I hated that there exists a programming language that could potentially have a pivotal place in every tech field and that to adapt to this ever-changing developers' world, you would need to learn Python.

I tried to find every way possible to avoid having to learn Python. I learned C++ for competitive programming, learned HTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP for my first websites, learned Matlab and Arduino for embedded systems, and learned Java and SQL because why not? Everything was going just fine as I did not have to worry about having to learn Python.

It was then. It was when I was first introduced to the world of AI. The prospect of having a piece of code does all the work for you got me into programming. But the thought of having a supermachine translate thousands and thousands of lines of text collects information from all over the Internet and returns a terse answer whenever you ask what "Floating Point Exception" means (Yes, I am talking about ChatGPT). AI caught me off guard. It caught me hard. It caught me so hard that I fell in love with it and decided that it is what I want to learn more about in the future.

So, I got to learning.

Convolutional Neural Network, Recurrent Neural Network, Backpropagation, Neural Machine Translation,... After days and days of learning the science and math behind AI and only understanding a whopping 15% of all the books and research papers, I could not wait to try and start my first AI/Machine Learning project. But guess what programming language is mainly used for AI? Of course, it's Python.

I knew this day would come. I know that I could not escape from the inevitable. That learning a ton of other languages was not enough to get me out of the woods.

After a whole two weeks of slacking through a Coursera Python Crash course, I figured that I should start a small project to revise what I have learned. I decided that a chess game would do a perfect project as it would have been my first game and first Python project. It took me a whole week (most of the time was just me stretching my eyes out debugging). I got used to it. I got used to not putting a semicolon after a command and not forgetting that the for-loops in Python are different from that in C++ (Like seriously, what's up with that? It looks so dumb).

It seems like Python was not all that bad.

It was time to code my first AI game. Using all that knowledge from my Chess game and some hours of research and finding out about NEAT, I coded a Flappy bird game with an ML bot. It was a heck lot of fun.

Well, well, well. Look who just had fun with Python.

It seems as if all this hating on Python was for nothing. I guess the people were right.

After spending a couple of minutes reading this blog, you must be thinking, "Is that all? Did this kid write so much about such a lame story?" Well, true; it doesn't have much to it as a story, but it was my realization. I realized that sometimes in order to achieve something that you REALLY love, you have to come to terms with something you hate. I realized that what is difficult about programming isn't that there isn't a free yet thorough online course; it is us- ourselves that are preventing us from going beyond. I learned that I was capable of changing and adapting, that I was capable of pushing myself forward.

I managed to bite through something I hated and made the most out of an uncomfortable situation because of something I really loved. Isn't that the same for all of us programmers?

"Great coders aren't born. They're compiled from binary." - Unknown