Current Events > ITT: Learning Python

(+) Yeah! (+)

Yeah yeah, I know I do a lot of these. I have a Japanese topic up, a drawing topic, even a J-girls topic. Now its going to be my journey through the Python Language too. Ever since Covid, I've told myself I can't stop wasting away in my room, so I'm putting my time to good use.

Anyway I've been following this video, and have already learnt a bit. I started 2 days ago, and will continue in the morning along with some Japanese. Then will do some drawing for about half an hour.

https://youtu.be/rfscVS0vtbw

So far I've learnt the very basics:

• Variables
• Strings
• Numbers
• True/False values
• Some functions

I've been able to code a calculator as per the video and even messed around with some basic script/functions along with some variables as practice today.



After that, I also learnt how to use lists and input various information while altering the values within them.

Next, I will be doing List functions as per the video.

Goodnight guys.


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Learnt about List Functions, basic functions and Tuples today.

Something that goes along like this:
def sayhi():
print("Hello user")

print("Top")
sayhi()
print("Bottom")

And then putting in parameters such as this:
def say_hi(name, age):
print("Hello " + name + ", you are " + str(age))

say_hi("Mike", 35)
say_hi("Steve", 70)

Tomorrow I'll be learning Return statement.


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What do you want to do with python?

Im guessing this is your first coding language so imo start thinking about a project to work on once you are through the tutorials

Ive seen a lot of people completely fizzle on python after doing tutorials because they never tried to use it for something real
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g980 posted...

What do you want to do with python?

Im guessing this is your first coding language so imo start thinking about a project to work on once you are through the tutorials

Ive seen a lot of people completely fizzle on python after doing tutorials because they never tried to use it for something real

My endgame is to find work with it and go on learning other coding languages.

One of my friends also has a masters and is a genius with coding, he said once I've got the hang of it he wants to make some programs with me. Even some videogames once I get proficient at it. So I can't wait for that.

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Be a man and start with C++

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Biggest trick to learning a language and sticking with it is to have a purpose. Make a small project using Python and put it on the net as a work example for your portfolio. It can be anything from a counting function to something more complex.

There's some other really bright programmers who used to program on this board but I dunno if they post here anymore. Heck, I just wander by occasionally lol. But I'm sure if you need help someone will help out. Good luck on the language as well.

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KobeSystem posted...

Be a man and start with C++

I did and I found it to be not that bad. I programmed a tank that drove (simulator). Can't remember jack shit of it now.... but it wasn't bad when I did it.

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KobeSystem posted...

Be a man and start with C++

Oh I'll get there soon!

CreekCo posted...

Biggest trick to learning a language and sticking with it is to have a purpose. Make a small project using Python and put it on the net as a work example for your portfolio. It can be anything from a counting function to something more complex.

There's some other really bright programmers who used to program on this board but I dunno if they post here anymore. Heck, I just wander by occasionally lol. But I'm sure if you need help someone will help out. Good luck on the language as well.

Thanks for the info man, Appreciate it. I'll be thinking up a few ideas tomorrow while practicing some of the functions I learnt today.

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SpiritSephiroth posted...

also learnt how to use lists and input various information while altering the values within them.

You can use f strings when you're printing.

name = input("Enter a name: ")
age = input("Enter an age: ")
race = input("Enter a race: ")

print(f"My name is {name}. I am {age} years old and I am a {race}")

Your print function will look similar to how you did it, but instead of adding the + age outside of the quotes, you just put the letter f in front of the double quotes, and instead of adding + age, you just put age in {} brackets. It's a lot simpler than having to go through the trouble of creating multiple quotes inside of a single print function, and it looks nicer.

This guy has a great tutorial for beginners.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTskrapNbzXhwoFUiLCjGgY7

This channel has a lot of good videos.
https://www.youtube.com/c/CodingTech/videos

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SpiritSephiroth posted...

My endgame is to find work with it and go on learning other coding languages.

One of my friends also has a masters and is a genius with coding, he said once I've got the hang of it he wants to make some programs with me. Even some videogames once I get proficient at it. So I can't wait for that.

Yea i was unclear, i meant what projects do you want to do as soon as youve done the tutorials

Like creekco said just have a small project lined up

Imo tutorials dont have a lot of answers, but they you teach how to google the right questions
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g980 posted...

Yea i was unclear, i meant what projects do you want to do as soon as youve done the tutorials

Like creekco said just have a small project lined up

This is important. Thanks man I'll research more and be more careful sorting out my plans for this.

I think I also need to know the extent in which python can be used.

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No progress today since I spent the whole day out. Gotta double my efforts tomorrow to make up for it.

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As others have said, finding a project to work towards helps a ton. I learned a lot making games since they combine so many different aspects of programming and can require careful thought in design due to many logic states as well as the need to keep up a high framerate. I wonder if gamefaqs has improved their code tag to preserve spaces. Testing...

def test:
print("test")

edit: nope lol. Useless!! Really funny since indents are important in Python.

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SpiritSephiroth posted...

No progress today since I spent the whole day out. Gotta double my efforts tomorrow to make up for it.

If you're interested I can link you to a reddit project that starts in a few days. Bunch of people are going to be making a roguelike. I'll probably end up following along for the fun of it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/roguelikedev/comments/o5x585/roguelikedev_does_the_complete_roguelike_tutorial/

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SomeLikeItHoth posted...

If you're interested I can link you to a reddit project that starts in a few days. Bunch of people are going to be making a roguelike. I'll probably end up following along for the fun of it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/roguelikedev/comments/o5x585/roguelikedev_does_the_complete_roguelike_tutorial/

That sounds awesome! Although I'm barely 5 days into learning this. I won't be much of a help.

Today I learnt if statements/comparisons, dictionaries and while loops. Before continuing, Im gonna practice them tomorrow so it will stay in my head.

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g980 posted...

What do you want to do with python?

Im guessing this is your first coding language so imo start thinking about a project to work on once you are through the tutorials

Ive seen a lot of people completely fizzle on python after doing tutorials because they never tried to use it for something real

how can he get a project right after learning the basics?

matchboxsantana posted...

how can he get a project right after learning the basics?

It will probably be a mess and maybe not work right

But thats how you actually learn to code... by coding

I never took any python tutorials and just started by picking something i wanted to automate and googling my way through it

The ideal approach is a combo of tutorials and projects
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awesome, i commend you for learning all this new stuff

I'll also second the advice to give yourself a small project to do once you learn the basics. Definitely don't be afraid to google/stack overflow stuff u don't know

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g980 posted...

It will probably be a mess and maybe not work right

But thats how you actually learn to code... by coding

I never took any python tutorials and just started by picking something i wanted to automate and googling my way through it

The ideal approach is a combo of tutorials and projects

sorry I meant getting a project after that (chronology, not whether the project will turn right)

Having a project gives you a direction. You have to think about "how can I achieve this?" and it gives you a reference point to figure out where to go for the next step. Knowledge acquisition is more natural when you pick the next topic based on what you need to do rather than just covering seemingly disparate topics that may or may not relate to each other. It's also beneficial for knowledge retention because you're putting into practice what you're learning instead of simply reading about it.

It's similar to how you'll learn language a lot quicker if you interact with others using that language and exposure yourself to media in that language. You don't have to take on a collaborative project. A solo project would be fine. You could also use a site like https://projecteuler.net to practice, but that's more geared towards mathy problems.

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matchboxsantana posted...

how can he get a project right after learning the basics?

Very easily. He won't be able to make Tower Defense or anything like that, but he can make simple game projects that will put his knowledge to use. For example, you can easily make Blackjack with just a few methods, if/else statements and importing random.

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Thanks guys, I'll look up what kind of project I can do even if I have a limited knowledge right now.

I learnt how to do while loops today. I also have a basic question:



The target sentence here is either: "You look like a exemplary individual/foreboding character". I got down how to give the choice to the user in picking either one using if statements (Before I was trying to do this with Boolean values, but that didn't turn out well) however the sentence isn't turning out the way I want it to.

The characteristic variable is being read before the printed sentence like this:


This is obviously messed up. So I learnt how to do part of the code, but failed to put the code generated by the if statement in the right place.

Not sure if I explained that all properly. Anyone know the simple solution?

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First line makes a call to input() which takes a string that you want to display to the terminal and returns what the user enters into the terminal. That gets assigned to the variable characteristic.

You input "light" so now characteristic == "light". It hits the line --if characteristic == "light":-- which resolves to true, because that is what the variable is holding. However, you make a call to the print() function. print() takes in a string and writes it out to the terminal. So the next output you see is "exemplary individual".

Finally it gets out of the if-block and hits the next print statement: --print("You look like a " + characteristic)--
Remember that characteristic is still holding the value "light", which is why it prints out "You look like a light".

Instead of --print("exemplary individual")-- you should be assigning the string "exemplary individual" to a variable. The quick fix would be to reassign characteristic to that value. So replace your print statements e.g.:

print("exemplary individual") instead becomes: characteristic = "exemplary individual"

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SpiritSephiroth posted...

Anyone know the simple solution?

Like the above person said, you have two print functions going on. And actually, the bottom print function isn't even needed.

characteristic = input("Please choose an alignment, Light or Dark: ").lower()

if characteristic == "light":
print("You look like an exemplary individual.")
elif characteristic == "dark":
print("You look like a foreboding character.")
else:
print("Invalid target")

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Python really reminds me of Bash or Powershell

1337toothbrush posted...

First line makes a call to input() which takes a string that you want to display to the terminal and returns what the user enters into the terminal. That gets assigned to the variable characteristic.

You input "light" so now characteristic == "light". It hits the line --if characteristic == "light":-- which resolves to true, because that is what the variable is holding. However, you make a call to the print() function. print() takes in a string and writes it out to the terminal. So the next output you see is "exemplary individual".

Finally it gets out of the if-block and hits the next print statement: --print("You look like a " + characteristic)--
Remember that characteristic is still holding the value "light", which is why it prints out "You look like a light".

Instead of --print("exemplary individual")-- you should be assigning the string "exemplary individual" to a variable. The quick fix would be to reassign characteristic to that value. So replace your print statements e.g.:

print("exemplary individual") instead becomes: characteristic = "exemplary individual"

SomeLikeItHoth posted...

Like the above person said, you have two print functions going on. And actually the bottom print function isn't even needed.

characteristic = input("Please choose an alignment, Light or Dark: ").lower()

if characteristic == "light":
print("You look like an exemplary individual.")
elif characteristic == "dark":
print("You look like a foreboding character.")
else:
print("Invalid target")

Unless you're using the light/dark functions for something else, in which case you could write this.

light = "exemplary indivudual"
dark = "foreboding character"

characteristic = input("Please choose an alignment, Light or Dark: ").lower()

if characteristic == "light":
print(f"You look like an {light}.")
elif characteristic == "dark":
print(f"You look like a {dark}.")
else:
print("Invalid target")

Thanks for the help guys! I knew I was missing something obvious but my brain wasn't thinking straight for some reason. Now I can continue practicing.

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Okay done for today. I have a few mini projects that I'm doing for practice. Done with 2, gonna do more tomorrow.

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It feels so good to get some code right after trying for so long. I was able to implement hints into this guessing game by just messing around with if statements. Also was able to input some Boolean code there too while using while loops (Saw a tutorial for this part) and it actually worked.



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Choco posted...

https://i.stack.imgur.com/52QrO.jpg

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Cool! Now try modifying your guessing game to use a randomly-generated number.

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SpiritSephiroth posted...

It feels so good to get some code right after trying for so long. I was able to implement hints into this guessing game by just messing around with if statements. Also was able to input some Boolean code there too while using while loops (Saw a tutorial for this part) and it actually worked.

Nice! Im not home right now so I cant test the code, but it looks good. You should look up the range function. It would help randomize your code.


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Some practice code I did at the end. Although the last code is kinda cutting shortcuts I have to admit.

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Also this code confuses the hell out of me. I think I'm just being overwhelmed with different codes now, both while loop and if loops.

Im gonna write it all down on a sheet of paper tomorrow if I have time and break down what each code does. I get the gist of it, but even then, If I try to replicate it on a blank page my mind gets so muddled.

Edit: I know what the outcome of the code does, but I want to know HOW to replicate the code while knowing what each factor does specifically, which I kind of understand the outline.

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In order to write code, you need to know two things:

1) What you want to achieve.
2) How to get there.

2) outlines the steps and 1) provides validation. Let's go over the steps in the code sample where you're replacing all vowels in a phrase with the letter "g" or "G" (matching case with the original vowel):

You need a variable to hold the result, so you declare: translation = "". Now this line is doing two important things. First, it's defining the existence of a string and second, it's assigning it the value of an empty string. When crafting algorithms, you need to account for different cases. Let's say the variable phrase is an empty string. In this case, you'd return an empty string as well. This is considered the base case (a trivial case that acts as a base). This is covered by starting translation off as "". Additionally, you need a data structure that can store the data that you append. You can append to that string as you go along, like you do in your code. What follows is the general case (what your algorithm is doing in general).

To translate, you need to go through phrase character by character, hence the line: for letter in phrase:. The inside of this loop is the critical part. What do you intend to do with every single character in phrase? Well, the algorithm checks against vowels and then does the appropriate action. Now why would you first set the letter to lower case? Because your string of vowels is also lower case and you want the algorithm to work on both lower-case and upper-case vowels in the string phrase. Things like that inform you on what functions you need to use and when.

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1337toothbrush posted...

In order to write code, you need to know two things:

1) What you want to achieve.
2) How to get there.

2) outlines the steps and 1) provides validation. Let's go over the steps in the code sample where you're replacing all vowels in a phrase with the letter "g" or "G" (matching case with the original vowel):

You need a variable to hold the result, so you declare: translation = "". Now this line is doing two important things. First, it's defining the existence of a string and second, it's assigning it the value of an empty string. When crafting algorithms, you need to account for different cases. Let's say the variable phrase is an empty string. In this case, you'd return an empty string as well. This is considered the base case (a trivial case that acts as a base). This is covered by starting translation off as "". Additionally, you need a data structure that can store the data that you append. You can append to that string as you go along, like you do in your code. What follows is the general case (what your algorithm is doing in general).

To translate, you need to go through phrase character by character, hence the line: for letter in phrase:. The inside of this loop is the critical part. What do you intend to do with every single character in phrase? Well, the algorithm checks against vowels and then does the appropriate action. Now why would you first set the letter to lower case? Because your string of vowels is also lower case and you want the algorithm to work on both lower-case and upper-case vowels in the string phrase. Things like that inform you on what functions you need to use and when.

Thanks man a lot of that made sense. Im gonna sleep on this and make another code similar to this tomorrow! Appreciate it.

But that first step you said, "what I want to achieve", I should be thinking more about this personally.

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SpiritSephiroth posted...

But that first step you said, "what I want to achieve", I should be thinking more about this personally.

this doesn't necessarily mean you need to think of something grandiose or even something useful at all. You can make programs that do whatever you want and especially when you're leaning they'll probably do a lot of pretty pointless stuff

The point here is that you need to be able to concretely formulate your goal. "I want a program that loads a paragraph and replaces every word in it with the word that comes after it in the dictionary" is a program you can actually make. "I want a program that does something to a paragraph of words" isn't really because it's poorly defined, you won't even know what you're trying to do, and when you do it you won't even know if you're done or not since you don't know what the goal was

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interesting

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I can't trust a language that doesn't have curly braces.

TC you should get this free course from Udemy.

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/comments/obq077/automate_the_boring_stuff_with_python_online/

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Questionmarktarius posted...

I can't trust a language that doesn't have curly braces.

It does tho
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kirbymuncher posted...

this doesn't necessarily mean you need to think of something grandiose or even something useful at all. You can make programs that do whatever you want and especially when you're leaning they'll probably do a lot of pretty pointless stuff

The point here is that you need to be able to concretely formulate your goal. "I want a program that loads a paragraph and replaces every word in it with the word that comes after it in the dictionary" is a program you can actually make. "I want a program that does something to a paragraph of words" isn't really because it's poorly defined, you won't even know what you're trying to do, and when you do it you won't even know if you're done or not since you don't know what the goal was

Thanks for the advice, makes sense the way you put it.

SomeLikeItHoth posted...

TC you should get this free course from Udemy.

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/comments/obq077/automate_the_boring_stuff_with_python_online/

I'll check it out, thanks!

Although I didn't get much done today since I was out. I'll be out tomorrow too but hopefully tomorrow night I can get some coding in along with my other studies.

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SpiritSephiroth posted...

hopefully tomorrow night I can get some coding in

What do you plan on working on?

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I'm very pro-python.

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I actually hate Python because of its performance issues, dynamic typing, use of indents to indicate blocks of code, and some other things. It's a decent learning language, I suppose, but particularly the lack of type notation doesn't force beginners to think enough about their datatypes and I think that'll come back to bite them. Python's excuse for enforcing indents is to get programmers into good habits, but formatters can do that stuff automatically. Meanwhile it's harder for tools to automatically determine what the intent of the programmer is with dynamic typing (e.g. did you mean to assign a string to a variable that held a number or was it a goof?).

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1337toothbrush posted...

I actually hate Python because of its performance issues, dynamic typing, use of indents to indicate blocks of code, and some other things. It's a decent learning language, I suppose, but particularly the lack of type notation doesn't force beginners to think enough about their datatypes and I think that'll come back to bite them

I would be really curious to know what % of python learners go on to other languages

Because i get a lot of utility out of just python for scripting and data analysis

Performance is never a problem with scripting because it just doesnt get that complex

And yea sometimes the data analysis gets slow, but i am guessing for myself and most casual coders, there is plenty of room for optimization to be done within python

But yea i get those objections if the idea is to use python as a gateway to a strongly typed language/career in SWE
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Within Python there are limitations for squeezing performance, though. If you wanted to take advantage of multiple threads/cores, you'll run into the GIL (Global Interpreter Lock). Only one thread can control the Python interpreter at a time. The "solution" is to use multiple processes instead of multiple threads, but then you have to pass data between processes. The thing is that there are entire classes of multiprocessing where you need to deal with a lot of data, so passing around huge amounts of data can destroy performance gains you get from splitting the workload.

Also, various aspects of Python's design prevents optimizations from the interpreter. There are a whole bunch of issues with optimizing within Python, that's why the most performant libraries are written in other languages like C or C++ and then compiled to be called from Python.

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1337toothbrush posted...

Within Python there are limitations for squeezing performance, though. If you wanted to take advantage of multiple threads/cores, you'll run into the GIL (Global Interpreter Lock). Only one thread can control the Python interpreter at a time. The "solution" is to use multiple processes instead of multiple threads, but then you have to pass data between processes. The thing is that there are entire classes of multiprocessing where you need to deal with a lot of data, so passing around huge amounts of data can destroy performance gains you get from splitting the workload.

Also, various aspects of Python's design prevents optimizations from the interpreter. There are a whole bunch of issues with optimizing within Python, that's why the most performant libraries are written in other languages like C or C++ and then compiled to be called from Python.

yea my point was that the code is probably written incompetently at a really high level for most people learning

e.g. manually looping through rows in a big pandas df instead of using vectors, or dumb things with strings
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Did a bit of coding but spent most of my day out again. Will be free tomorrow to finish off these tutorials!

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Went over comments, Try except and how to read/alter files. Did the code over.

Once I'm done with the rest of these Im going to almost exclusively rely on my own coding while looking stuff up. I don't want to fall into the habit of just looking at tutorials exclusively. Once I've learnt a lot by myself I might start on the free Udemy course posted earlier.

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