Sloloem t1_iyeb96m wrote on November 30, 2022 at 7:32 PM

Reply to comment by OldHellaGnarGnar2 in ELI5: why is using "goto" considered to be a bad practice in programming? by Dacadey

I was speaking mostly to a mindset difference in how you approach the new language.

You'll be better at Python in the long run if you start from the description of what a program is supposed to do and treating the original code itself as a black box rather than trying to translate Matlab syntax to Python syntax because knowing the language is more than just knowing the syntax, you need all those idiomatic expressions. Python has some interesting collection structures and ways of manipulating those that I don't know if Matlab has direct equivalents for, so learning how to use them is just as much of learning Python as learning the syntax.

Honestly being curious about how programming works at all is a trait I wish more developers had so that puts you above half the people I've interviewed for jobs.

OldHellaGnarGnar2 t1_iyeh3yo wrote on November 30, 2022 at 8:09 PM

Ahh, ok that makes a lot of sense. So, rather than doing a one-to-one translation, figure out how I can take advantage of python's capabilities vs whatever language I'm trying to convert code from.

Secondary question:

Is your comment related at all to programming paradigms? Like, I think all the code I know how to write would be considered "functional" (I didn't learn anything about paradigms in school), so after seeing some discussion on paradigms and watching some videos, I'm trying to understand "when would I use object-oriented" or another paradigm. So maybe if I learned to write in a different paradigm, it could be a better fit than what I'd be able to write in functional?

Sloloem t1_iyeqfi9 wrote on November 30, 2022 at 9:08 PM

Yeah exactly, to both points. Learning how to do similar things under different paradigms is a great skill because it keeps you from getting too stuck on one way to approach a problem but learning all the available paradigms is mostly an academic exercise. You can learn the paradigms to identify their influences on languages but unless you're going into language design or academia they can be pretty esoteric. Not very many languages are purely single-paradigm. Most languages take influence from multiple paradigms and include features from those that designers like, creating fairly unique ways of expressing program instructions.

Example off the top of my head would be something like Scala. Scala adds features of the Functional paradigm to the Java language which is very Object-Oriented in its design. So if you're writing Scala you can write it like OO code, Functional code, or a mix of both. Scala idioms prefer Functional approaches so if you use those you tend to write less code and stuff runs better but you can also work with objects and gain some benefits of OO concepts like function encapsulation.

Python is another language that takes hints from Functional programming and OO programming, but implements its objects and classes very differently from how Java does it.