[Tutor] Python 3 for Beginners was: (Re: intro book for python)

[Leam Hall]

On 09/03/2017 12:10 AM, Mark Lawrence via Tutor wrote:
> On 01/09/17 18:51, Raghunadh wrote:
>> Hello Derek,
>>
>> I would start with this book
>>
>> https://learnpythonthehardway.org
>>
>> Raghunadh
>>
> 
> I cannot recommend anything from the author of LPTHW after he had the 
> audacity to write this 
> https://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/nopython3.html about Python 3, in 
> addition to which there are several vastly superior books and/or 
> tutorials anyway.
> 
> Kindest regards.
> 
> Mark Lawrence.

There are lots of other books on Python, that's true. "Practical 
Programming" (Gries, Campbell, Montojo) is one I use.

Are you going to toss "Learning Python" since Mark points out some of 
python's drift from it's core values?

I appreciate that link. Zed's right. Python 3 isn't used by the OS tools 
on Red Hat, and that's that major Linux vendor in the US. Has SuSE 
converted all OS tools to require Python 3? Ubuntu 18 is supposed to be 
Python 3 only, whenever it gets out.

Anyone that uses python on Linux has to use Python 2. That means Python 
3 is just one more language that requires work to install and maintain. 
I'm not seeing the benefits. How long has Python 3 been out? How many 
others are seeing the benefits of total change? When will people who say 
"you should upgrade" realize it's weeks or months of work with no real 
reason to do so?

Yesterday I was coding and had to work around Python 3 dict.keys() 
returning a "dict_keys" type vs a list. Why did we need another type for 
this? I'm a coding beginner. I can talk a decent game in a few languages 
like python but I'm not experienced enough or smart enough to deal with 
these sorts of problems easily. Returning a new type, without 
significant benefit, makes it harder for people to progress in the 
language.

Some years ago I wanted to play with an IRC bot sort of thing. Someone 
on Freenode #python mentioned Twisted so I got that and started playing. 
Half an hour, maybe forty five minutes later and my little project did 
what I was trying to do. This was before I really knew any python; the 
language was that clean and easy to learn.

I'd prefer Zed be wrong about Python dying. I'm not willing to put any 
money on it though.

Leam