Confession

Be kind to yourself when learning a new programming language

What’s the background?

I tried learning Python having previously used R. I had always found the documentation in R really good and easy to find the solution to whatever I was doing. I found the Python documentation a bit harder to navigate.

What happened?

I was expected to use Python for a new project. I read a Python book and thought I was ready to start coding in Python. But I still found I couldn’t get somethings to work first time and was constantly searching the internet for the Python equivalent of how I did things in R. I found it quite frustrating when things didn’t work and I started to criticise myself a lot. I found it took me a lot longer to do some things in Python than if I was writing in R, which was still much more familiar to me.

What did I learn?

• Be kind to yourself when learning a new language.
• Expect that it might take longer to do things in a new language, even once you’ve read the book.
• You might find yourself doing things in the style of other languages (“speaking Python with an R accent”) even when that isn’t how things are usually done by experts in that language.