Comment by alexb_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexb_ | Hacker News Reader

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An astonishing number of people here are missing the point. Doing something like "making a small script to analyze CSVs" has become a massively complicated undertaking requiring you to follow random guides that might be 6 months old (practically half a century in these circles), install random programs and dependencies using other random programs and dependencies that you don't even understand, and do many steps that seem like completely nonsense.

Yes, it's incredibly complex. It doesn't have to be and a lot of it is completely unnecessary, driven by the tech world's inability to stick with literally anything for more than a few years before collectively deciding it's all trash and you should REALLY be using this brand new thing that only half works instead. It doesn't need to be this hard, and that's what I'm trying to say. Using this to shit on the person for thinking their simple task would be simple is completely missing the point - if anything, it proves it.

The author of the tweets doesn't seem very interested in learning the basics. They want to open Python and magically start processing CSV.

That's not how that works. CSV processing is an easy task if you know the basics and read the manual. The author wants to skip the boring parts that are essential for the easy part of their objective. They get frustrated with terms they don't know and tools they haven't heard of but seem unwilling to read up on their problem, instead copy pasting stuff until it works and then looking up what went wrong afterwards. Yeah, you're going to have a terrible time learning anything if you're not willing to understand the basics before throwing your frustrations at them until they work.

If I go into a sculpting class saying "I don't want to learn about materials, I came here to sculpt my own version of Michelangelo's David" then I would be told to shut up, sit down, and start learning.

Just because someone can't get their instant gratification doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the field of programming. If you're goal oriented then you'd better be willing to learn every single requirement for reaching that goal or you won't succeed.

I think the fact that the author managed to learn how to process their CSV in four days is a testament to how far we've come. It took me weeks to get to that level on my own with the manuals and offline tutorials I downloaded on the school PCs.

Manipulating csv has become way easier than it was.

You have: 1. Spreadsheets where you can import this data and manipulate it visually 2. CLI tools made especially to work on csv, with fancy colors, shortcuts, examples 3. Visual tools for data analysis like google data studio, power bi etc. Where you basically dragon drop the data and pick charts 4. RStudio where you can load your data using file->open and then copy some simple commands to work on it 5. No-code tools where you can copy paste the data and add functionality by clicking through tutorials 6. All kinds of online notebooks where you don't have to install pandas...

It has not became harder.

swear to god if one more person talks about the specifics of this illustrative case, and then goes on to explain how they are so silly and should have used tool "xyz" my head is going to explode

You don't need to use any tool, it's a general purpose programming language, so "making a script to analyze csv" requires you to learn the basics of programming and what csv is.

It's not unnecessarily complex, but expecting people to handhold and teach you programming for free when you haven't shown any commitment to learning is silly. If you were to do this, you will essentially be writing programs for clueless people for free and they just move on(they may not learn anything).

If you want to learn programming join a bootcamp or a hacker group or get a formal education(where people will be paid for this).

I'm not sure if you've read my comment.

I was replying to your: > Yes, it's incredibly complex. It doesn't have to be

It's not complex.

Python does not know what a CSV file is. It doesn't know what a JPEG is. If you want to work with these things you have to tell Python what they are. If you want to use a library to do that you need to know how to install a library such that Python knows what it is and where it is.

You can play around in Photoshop because and get decent results because it already knows what a JPEG is. All of the tools are built around working with 2D images and share a set of abstractions. You might do a shitty job but you're not likely to break your image or be unable to do anything.

Python is not "Photoshop for CSV files". It's not Photoshop for anything. So you must learn some basics to use it an Aella decided learning was stupid and she could just copy and paste her way through the process.

A rational person confronts by terms they didn't understand in some instructions would take a step back and realize maybe they were missing some fundamentals.

Download Python.

import csv

?

Download python.

Data = open(“file.csv”, “r”)

For line in data.readlines(): Print(line.split”,”)

Well...

Blah1, blah2, "blah3, blah4", blah5

Maybe using a library is a better route.

Okay sure, but I have processed millions of lines of csv data using readlines and split.

Eventually yeah you’re going to run into something with characters you don’t like, but that’s just a teaching/learning moment!

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