Question: How hard is it to write python and Java code

Peter Megyesi answered on 18 Mar 2021:

There are a few separate bits that add up my answer:

If you like doing something you very often find that it’s not hard. It can be challenging, like beating a tough opponent in a game, but if you are having fun while you do it you’ll probably not think of it as hard 🙂

So is coding generally hard? It might seem hard first when you start writing your own, but actually it’s not that hard to write some code that does something meaningful…

It’s much more about the problems that you try and solve through code that can be hard.

I.e. if you’re trying to build an app that checks how the weather is at the moment to let you know if you need an umbrella – that’s not hard to do. But if you’re trying to build an app that tries to predict how much a house could be worth in 20 years time using all sorts of data including global warming charts to see how much worse the weather will get in that house’s area… That’s significantly harder to do.
And using python instead of java or something else wouldn’t make the problem much less difficult.
(Though it’s also true that some prog. languages are better suited to certain tasks and horrible in others, for example using python for building an app’s UI would be a nightmare but using it for doing the data analysis very efficient.)

Lastly, very often when we ask how hard, we really mean the how long does it take to learn it?
That can be really important when just starting out. The good news is that python definitely has a flat learning curve and java’s isn’t much steeper either so I would say both of them can be great to start with.
An even better piece of news is that after a couple years you’ll realise it’s not that much about the language, but the way you do things, core concepts etc that is important but pretty much the same across all languages… Anyway, we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, do we?
For now just focus on the whatever you like best! 🙂