7
kiki
1y

This is why I don't use and will probably never use Python.

Back in the uni days, I had a very important assignment. It determined whether I was going to the fourth grade from the third or not. It involved math and charting. It was very complex, and I spent a very long time on research, naturally. I knew Python 3, and I decided to use it. The only lib I needed was matplotlib, which I installed with pip. So I did the whole thing, tested it again at home, closed my laptop and was ready to go. My laptop used Windows 7 and was set up to ignore the lid closing. When I closed it, nothing would happen, even the screen stayed on. When I arrived at the lab, I opened my laptop, hit Ctrl + B as usual… and matplotlib import wasn't working. I obviously panicked, I tried to do something about it, but it just kept throwing an import error. Reinstalling the library didn't help. My friends too weren't able to help me. It just wasn't working, and that was it.

I failed the assignment, automatically. I had nothing to show. This was the first time I failed anything in the uni. Later I rewrote the code in C++ with Qt plotting library, and everything worked fine.

I never used Python since. I did everything uni with C++, and later with JavaScript. I don't care if it was Windows error or Python's. My Windows install was clean, I reinstalled it pretty much every year and kept the default settings. My laptop was for studying purposes only, and all my personal life happened on my desktop.

I didn't use exotic things like PyPy. It was just Python 3, the most basic, official installation. If you promote your fucking language as a cross-platform solution, please be bothered to make its basic behaviour stable on the most popular OS out there.

I will probably never use Python again. Maybe this issue was addressed and fixed. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it never would've happened on Linux or Mac. I don't care. It's like maintaining friendship with a person that betrayed you. I just can't do it.

JS and NPM never failed me.

Comments
  • 3
    Sounds like a you problem with Python, never experienced this myself
  • 0
    3 questions:

    1. WTF????

    2. Did you find out what the problem was? This sounds curious

    3. What does Ctrl+B do?
  • 1
    @netikras it makes text bold.....
    Beyond that, umm.... Kiki's remapped it for something.
  • 2
    @netikras Ctrl + B builds and runs the code in Sublime Text. No, I didn't. I was too heartbroken to research that. I never deleted python though, it was just sitting there staring at me. I felt uneasy touching my laptop after the incident. Later as I reinstalled Windows, I didn't install Python. I couldn't force myself to use the laptop again, so I gave it to my younger brother and forgot about it. Instead of a laptop, I was just taking a flash drive with me, uni computers had C++ anyway
  • 0
    I had a problem like this but couldn't remember it. I learned from it and never installed packages system-wide. I learned and started using pyenv and venv.

    I wanted to learn JS/NodeJS and rewrote a bot I made in Python. The number of NPM packages and the storage they consumed turned me off.
  • 0
    @fruitfcker all that additional tools are a bit too much for the students in a uni environment

    unis are not online courses, and they don't have a focus on real-world applications, scalability and other things you might need at the job interview

    we could barely use git at that time, let alone python. pip required a separate explanation
  • 0
    Python environments in Windows can be annoying because it does not work with aliases like in any Unix based OS afaik. Dumb shit OS installer now installs it on user roaming by default for some reason and it can screw up if you got different python versions installed.

    I prefer installing Python in the main OS drive and then create a virtual environment to have reproducible behavior... or simply use Linux when I am not forced to use Windows.
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