PhilipTheBucket

In the olden times, it was a big point of pride of American politics that a lot of people didn’t want to kill the leaders. It was sort of assumed that in feudal style European politics, of course the common people kind of wanted to kill you, because you were threatening their safety and taking their stuff. In America, the way we did things was to earn the respect of the people you governed. The people actually wanted this person to be in charge. Why would I shoot that guy? That’s who we picked, we like him.

Of course there are some caveats (slavery large among them). The reality never matched up to the ideal. But we’re going back to where even the approximation of consent of the governed that we used to have, isn’t assumed anymore. Fuckin bullshit

Dude you were the one that asked the fucking question lol

You define it in exactly the same way you just did. Completely fine, you have to do it for lots of things. It’s nice that Python can do that too.

Now, I’ll grab a random snippet of code from some random file from my source dir:

        existing_bookmarks = db.session.execute(
            text('SELECT post_reply_id FROM "post_reply_bookmark" WHERE user_id = :user_id'),
            {"user_id": user_id}).scalars()
        reply = PostReply.query.filter(PostReply.id.in_(existing_bookmarks), PostReply.deleted == False).first()
        if reply:
            data = {"comment_id": reply.id, "save": True}
            with pytest.raises(Exception) as ex:
                put_reply_save(auth, data)
            assert str(ex.value) == 'This comment has already been bookmarked.'

You can see some classes in use, which again is fine. But you also see inline instantiation of some reply JSON, a database returning a list of post_reply_id values without needing a special interface definition for returning multiple values, lots and lots of cognitive and computational load per line of code that’s being saved because the language features are saving people the heavy lifting of depending on user-defined classes for everything. It means you don’t have as many adventures through the code where you’re trying to modify a user-defined interface class, you don’t need as much strong typing, that kind of thing.

I would bet heavily that a lot of the things that are happening in that short little space of code, would need specific classes to get them done if the same project were getting implemented in some C+±derived language. Maybe not, I just grabbed a random segment of code instead of trying especially hard to find my perfect example to prove my point.

It is fine, there are significant weaknesses to Python too, I’m not trying to say “yay python it’s better for everything,” anything like that. I’m just saying that if you don’t get familiar with at least some language that does things more that way, and instead get solely accustomed to just user-defined classes or templates for every information exchange or functional definition, then you’ll be missing out on a good paradigm for thinking about programming. That’s all.

Complex data structures are not “more of a C++ type of program structure”.

Oh, they are not at all. Equating complex data structures with user-defined data structures (in the form of classes and fields and whatnot), and using the latter as the primary method of storing and working with data (so that you’re constantly having to bring into your mental scope a bunch of different classes and how they need to interact), is 100% a C++ type of program structure. It’s pretty unusual in my experience in Python. Or, I mean, it’s perfectly common, but it’s not primary in the same universal way that it is in C++ and derivatives. It gets to exist as its own useful thing without being the only way. That’s what I am trying to say.

IDK, I just have never really had this become a serious issue for me. I get what you mean, some actions are a little bit of a pain in the neck because people are often sloppy about typing, but literally the only time I can remember it being an issue at all has been when numpy is involved and so I have to figure out if something is a native Python thing or a numpy-fied custom structure.

I mean there’s just not that many types. Generally something is a list, a number, a map, or a string, and it’s pretty obvious which. Maybe there are OOP domain things where a lot of variables are objects of some kind of class (sort of more of a C++ type of program structure), and so it starts to become really critical to have strong type tools, I’m just saying I haven’t really encountered too much trouble with it. I’m not saying it’s imaginary, you may be right in your experience, I’m just saying I’ve worked on projects way bigger than a few hundred lines and never really had too much of an issue with it in practice in my experience.

Plus I felt python was too new and would skip a lot of core programming skills id just like to know. Im not super interested in doing it the new way with all the helpers, or I wont feel like I learned anything.

Okay, you definitely want to learn C then. C# and C++ both add a ton of helpers. C# has a massive runtime environment that’s opaque and a little bit weird, and C++ has a massive compile-time environment that’s opaque and very weird. It’s sort of pick your poison. If you learn C and get skilled with it, you’ll be well set up for understanding what is actually going on and having strong fundamentals that will set you up well for whatever higher-level language you want to learn in the future.

Put another way: C# will hide just as many of the fundamentals and hardcore details from you as python will, it’ll just do it in a weird and counterintuitive fashion that will make it more confusing and with more weird C#-specific details.

I’d eventually like to learn unity as well so i decided on c#

I would actually just cut out the middleman and start with the Unity editor then. It actually might be a really good introduction to the nature of programming in general without throwing a bunch of extra nonsense at you, and in a really motivating format.

I do have the .net sdk and it seems to try to compile a simple program, it just throws errors even on an example program that shouldn’t have any. Im sure its something dumb.

What’s the program and what’s the error? I’m happy to help if something jumps out at me. I’m voicing my opinion otherwise on what might be better ways to attack this all in general, but I’m sure me or people here can help sort out the issues if you really want to take this approach and you’re just getting stuck on something simple.

C# represents about 12% of the jobs out there.

https://www.devjobsscanner.com/blog/top-8-most-demanded-programming-languages/

It’s not unpopular, but it’s definitely not “massively” popular anymore. Different languages have different strengths and weaknesses, but C# has a few more weaknesses than most. In my opinion. Yes, there’s nothing wrong with learning any particular language you want to learn (and I’m a little surprised to see C++ has fallen significantly lower than C#, sure, fair enough). I’m just struggling to see an upside for learning it in the modern day (and now knowing more about what this person’s goal is I feel even more strongly that C# is the wrong answer for them. In my opinion.)

You can do strict typing in python if you want it, it’s very highly recommended if you’re doing a big project.

I really would not recommend specializing in C# at this point in computing history. You can do what you want obviously, but Python is much more likely to be what you want. C++ or Java might be okay if you want a job and are okay with a little bit dated / not ideal languages, or you could learn one of the proliferation of niche backend Linuxy languages, but C# has most of the drawbacks of C++ and Java without having even their relative level of popularity.

IDK what issue you’re having with VSCode, but I think installing the .NET SDK and then using dotnet by hand from the command line, to test the install, might be a good precursor to getting it working in VSCode. But IDK why you would endeavor to do this in the first place.

Yeah. I feel like in a few years when literally nothing works or is maintainable, people are going to have a resurgent realization of the importance of reliability in software design, that just throwing bodies and lines of code at the problem builds up a shaky structure that just isn’t workable anymore once it grows beyond a certain size.

We used to know that, and somehow we forgot.

Yeah. I have no idea what the answer is, just describing the nature of the issue. I come from the days when you would maybe import like one library to do something special like .png reading or something, and you basically did all the rest yourself. The way programming gets done today is wild to me.

I sort of have a suspicion that there is some mathematical proof that, as soon as it becomes quick and easy to import an arbitrary number of dependencies into your project along with their dependencies, the size of the average project’s dependencies starts to follow an exponential growth curve increasing every year, without limit.

I notice that this stuff didn’t happen with package managers + autoconf/automake. It was only once it became super-trivial to do from the programmer side, that the growth curve started. I’ve literally had trivial projects pull in thousands of dependencies recursively, because it’s easier to do that than to take literally one hour implementing a little modified-file watcher function or something.

Same as anything really

They actually observed the natives setting those controlled burns, and decided to themselves, “Yeah they’re wild savages, they clearly don’t give a fuck about anything or know what they’re doing, here’s me with syphilis and muskets and I think it’s time to share civilization with them, they’ll thank me later.” All that magic prairie ecosystem (which is basically gone now) was a carefully constructed environment maintained over generations to make hunting big game cheap and easy. But no, let’s have railroads and lead paint instead.