My journey into the world of Python

Approaching coding as a complete novice I quickly realised that I would need to research which language to learn. My initial thought was ‘Oh, I’ll just learn the one that’s most widely used’. Well, the upshot of that is that there are a handful of languages that are used widely, all of which have different pros and cons. So, the first big question down this rabbit hole was ‘what do you want to do with coding?’ My answer; gather and analyse large volumes of data, automate repetitive tasks, design some cool software that I can’t find online for issues I’ve encountered and take my nerd status to the next level.

Many of my R&D colleagues overseas have vast coding experience and after discussions with them, it became evident that either Python or R would be most appropriate. Further discussions with external contacts working in a scientific field also threw back Python. With this split between Python and R I took to the internet. Python boasts simple to read, yet powerful coding whereas R is one of the most established languages for scientific analysis.

I had a play around with both Python and R, but found Python’s syntax to be much more appealing and straight forward. As I’m learning in my spare time, a straight forward syntax was a big plus. Logic aside, there was also an inexplicable pull towards Python once I’d begun to research it properly. The language takes inspiration from Monty Python and references the show where possible as well having light-hearted philosophy. One such example is “we are all consenting adults here”, referring to private methods and variables within a class not actually being private. They are marked as private as a warning to other developers to ‘use at your own risk’. This philosophy was quite appealing to me.

So Python was/is the chosen language for me. From my conversations and own research this language seemed like a good choice for my aims. Time will tell if it is as powerful as the community says. I’m still ahead of this blog with my learning and spoiler alert, the community wasn’t lying!