I still remember the first line of code I wrote. It was a ‘Hello World’ written in python. Since then I’ve learnt that Hello World is more than just being polite, it’s part of our culture as programmers. In fact, one way to rank languages is by how fast you can write a Hello World program. In that respect, python is pretty awesome.
On a side note, I recently picked up python again after a 7+ year hiatus. Back then I had no idea what I was doing, all I wanted to do was develop a video game. Yah, Rollercoaster Tycoon was that awesome. It made me dream of creating my own game one day. But I digress.
Python turned out to be a fun and fast way of accomplishing a task that was needed. At first I was going to write something in Java to hit an api and do the work I needed. After firing up intellij I knew there had to be a better way.
A software engineer must know his tools
Java is my best language, but for this task it just seemed overkill. Enter python.
It took a bit of Googling to get up to speed after not using python for 7 years, but it was well worth it. Python is a ‘Hello Word’ friendly language and really easy to use.
Lesson learned: Know your tools. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.