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Comment by kaoD | Hacker News Reader

> needlessly complicated

IMO this is unfair characterization.

If using Photoshop is driving, programming is building an internal combustion engine vehicle. You cannot expect to just randomly google for car-making tutorials and get an SUV done in a weekend. Heck, you can't even expect to be able to build a very simple combustion engine from basic principles without a lot of study.

I'm not saying this is Aella's fault or anything, it's fair to have wrong expectations, but calling this "needlessly complicated" is not fair either.

If I had to take something away from that Twitter thread is how marvelous is that someone without any programming experience has been able to programatically manipulate CSV data in a couple of days.

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I also think that Aella had abstraction mismatch. Python does not know what CSV is when she tries to "Okay, cool. I want to upload a csv, the data I want to analyze". It sounds to python identical as if you said "Make me a sandwich". You need to explain to python what a "sandwich" is, using abstraction that python understands. In CSV case this work is done by pandas.

So for that first you need to LEARN what abstractions python has and how to use them to build higher level abstractions.

It's like being angry at hammer that it cant be used as surgical scalpel. "it's a tool, so it should do what i need"

I feel a bit of this every time there are pushes to get everyone to code, it's very weird. Sort of related is the expectation that you should just be able to switch into a programming career in a few weeks. You can't do that with almost any other meaningful career but for some reason you "should" be able to for programming and there are very profitable businesses selling the lie that you can.

I agree, the expectation of everyone being able to switch to a programming career is of course ridiculous. Neither should this be the expectation nor should everyone actually get into a programming career. Better to leave that to the professionals, who have chosen this path and have the necessary education to avoid building in the typical traps. Learning programming can take a week, but mastering it may take a lifetime. Just the fact, that a person can write a little bit of code, does not mean, that it must become their profession.

However, I do think, that people should be able to make use of the tools they have. Learning a little bit of programming can get people going a long way and there are so many learning resources out there, that you can learn more any time you want. (Of course tutorial hell is a thing.) We really should encourage people to become computer literate and to become enabled. There is no reason to keep our knowledge from people.

I don't think this is a good analogy.

Not every programming project is a project that takes hundreds of skilled engineers. Not every programming project needs to deliver a product for others to use.

What Aella wants to do is something pretty simple, and it's frustratinc that this is so hard.

> What Aella wants to do is something pretty simple, and it's frustratinc that this is so hard.

It's not that hard.

Doing it like a Real Data Scientist is hard, but also completely unnecessary for a beginner non-programmer. That doesn't stop well-meaning folks from advising that approach (install pandas, Jupyter, anaconda, etc.) and overwhelming people.

The Python standard library is batteries included. IDLE exists.

I think the problem is that there are so many options, some more accessible to newcomers, some less. For example, I think Thonny is a nice entry level Python "GUI"

But it's really hard to find what to start with from a google search.

> I think the problem is that there are so many options, some more accessible to newcomers, some less. For example, I think Thonny is a nice entry level Python "GUI"

And I think users tend to grow out of entry-level tools pretty quickly so it's hard for any one option to become universal.

> But it's really hard to find what to start with from a google search.

That's true, but I think it has a lot more to do with the quality of educational material for beginners than the simplicity or complexity of available tools.

> What Aella wants to do is something pretty simple, and it's frustratinc that this is so hard.

What Aella wants to actually do and how she describes what she wants to do may not have any relationship to each other. So we've got a potential X/Y problem.

Then there's just the jumping in assuming Python is like Photoshop. You can "learn Photoshop" just by playing around with it. You won't be a graphic designer after a week of goofing around but you can make a cool logo for a web page or touch up photos you took with your phone.

What Photoshop is to a selfie, Python is not to a CSV file. Even "CSV file" is ambiguous because that can actually mean a lot of different things.

The difference between the Aella case and the story in the OP is Aella is assuming Python is Photoshop for CSV files. The OP knows JavaScript is a language and has a notion of how npm is supposed to work. Aella got bit by ignorance and stubbornness. The OP got bit by terrible tools.

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