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Comment by stackghost | Hacker News Reader

I'm in an MBA program and in my data science course (aimed at non programmers obviously) the prof used R and Rstudio.

At first I thought it was a bad choice, and I did all my assignments with Emacs/ESS. I preferred it, as I do almost all my coding in emacs and of course it's easy to define custom shortcuts to insert the un-ergonomic R operators like the magrittr pipe. But I came to realize that the way Rstudio is self-contained, and oriented around "sessions", or notebook-style code, makes it easier for neophytes to pick up.

I can't imagine how difficult it would be to teach a bunch of non programmers how to deal with python given the insane situation with venvs, pip vs homebrew, and 2 vs 3, imports, etc. 80% of my cohort are the type of people who think using the terminal constitutes "hacking" in the CrashOverride sense.

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> 2 vs 3

Is this really still relevant? I've been using only python3 for well over a decade now and I can't remember the last time anyone even suggested I use python2. the rest of your critiques ring true though.

Maybe you're right and it's not, but Python is definitely a Rube Goldberg machine of tutorials, libraries, and people who will tell you with a straight face that it's reasonable and expected to have 3.10, 3.11, and 3.12 installed alongside each other because reasons.

I say this as someone who writes a fair amount of python and whose package manager decided to install 3.10, 3.11, and 3.12 as dependencies.

Anyway, try explaining that to a bunch of business school people who are accustomed to just doing everything in the latest version of Excel, whatever that happens to be.

They will soon have a convenient starting point: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/introduction-to-p...

...OMG. Getting worse

Oh good grief.

Looking forward to searching for tutorials explaining the difference between Python .NET Core, Python ASP.NET Core, Python .NET for Business, and Excel .NET Core

> try explaining that to a bunch of business school people

Never mind them! I have been programming for decades and have been defeated twice by Python and its disrespect for semantic versioning

Those version 3s often introduce breaking changes.

I continue to be amazed and astounded that it is so popular. A poster child for "do not choose software based principally on popularity". Being unpopular is a handicap, but being popular - just look at Python. The Python ecosystem is a *nightmare*

For Python, we settled on using Jupyter notebooks for the first semester to teach the language itself, while gradually introducing all the paraphernalia.

This is of course introduces another problem of ‘two cultures’: Python people using Jupyter and the R community largely preferring Markdown.

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