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Comment by ggregoire | Hacker News Reader

web programming is probably on the 3rd or 4th rank of what python is used for nowadays

Also, you don't really need to "learn" python. I mean, if you have been in this industry for long enough, it's the kind of languages that you can pick up in 1 afternoon. That's just how basic and easy it is. That's why it's so popular despite all its flaws. Like I'm sure you somehow already know python, even if you never used it.

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There's a distance from knowing Python enough to find your way around in projects to knowing it enough to solve coding riddles. The latter requires the level of familiarity attained only with regular use. Plenty developers go by their daily jobs without having to write a single line of Python.

I'd actually say it's the former that requires familiarity with the language. The latter only requires you to know some basic looping/control constructs. You don't need to know anything about classes or modules, for example. No need to understand async vs threads vs multiprocessing.

Honestly if you write psuedocode for an algorithm, there's a decent chance it'll be correct Python even if you've never seen Python.

> it's the kind of languages that you can pick up in 1 afternoon

Yeah nah. Especially not for current Python, which is quite a bit more complex and involved than it was 20 years ago.

Of course you can get some stuff done in Python on your first afternoon, but that's true for most mainstream languages. And that's nowhere near the same as actually knowing what you're doing.

I agree, but the context is to pick it up well enough to do coding interviews. Which I think is fair. People can pick up enough python for coding interviews pretty easily.

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