Thank You | from Nova

[u/novadiony]

Hello!
I'm Nova, I'm a college student taking CS in Norway. And I just wanted to share a bit of my story.

I started my developing career roughly 7 years ago when I was 8-9. I remember watching so many movies about these hackers and programmers growing up, and thinking "Wow, I wish I could be like them!". Luckily my father had a computer science background himself! So he saw this and showed me a couple things such as Scratch, blablabla.
I quickly quit Scratch, cause I thought it was boring and hard. But just a few months later, I installed Python and VSCode on the family computer! I started watching a multi hour Python course by Programming with Mosh and followed along. I remember being so bored haha!

But it clicked. It really did. It scratched (pardon the pun) something that Scratch couldn't. Some abstract yet so understandable logic. At the time it really felt like I was on top of the whole world.
Somewhere in the second last to last years of primary school, I was fully invested. I was making calculator apps and whatever I could think of during the free time at school with the provided iPads that hadn't been there the year before. Heck! I got some other kids in my class to become interested in programming too!

Eventually, a year later when I started middle school/high school (combined into the same three years in Norway), I naturally started learning new things such as Java and C# .NET. My Python usage was mostly just small prototypes for other languages at that time.

Yet I never abandoned it. Not even now.
Python is what started my journey, and I am so grateful for everything it has done.

So thank you,
Thank all of you,

Thank you every random StackOverflow member who posted weirdly specific help threads.

Thank you every StackOverflow member who responded to my silly little questions.

Thank you to all the Python maintainers and contributors.

Thank you Guido van Rossum for founding the language.

And thank you to the whole Python community who made this student's childhood dreams possible and bloom to life.

- Nova

[u/novadiony → u/[deleted]]

Haha! Couldn't have said it better myself

[u/adosztal → u/[deleted]]

> Who were you, Denvercoder9? What did you see?!

[u/Capable_Fig → u/[deleted]]

i owe a lot of people a beer. without SO, i am nothing

[u/wRAR_ → u/[deleted]]

They trained you, for example.

[u/spackenheimer]

With all due Respect to Guido van Rossum, please, please, get rid of TCL/TK.

[u/Capable_Fig]

Welcome, just try to wait till 10yoe before developing the trichotillomania synonymous with our profession.

[u/novadiony → u/Capable_Fig]

I wish I could wait, but apparently it chooses you non consensually!

[u/novadiony → u/[deleted]]

Likewise!

[u/Potential_Ship_1676]

The part that stands out to me is you kept prototyping in Python after picking up Java and C#, most people treat the first language as something to leave behind.

[u/novadiony → u/Potential_Ship_1676]

Well it does its job decently well, and development is quite a bit faster than with heavier enterprise languages such as Java! So I personally find it quite enjoyable when I just need to know that the concepts work!

[u/SameBoysenberry5946]

Love this. Python was my first language too and I still reach for it whenever I need to prototype something fast. There's something about how readable it is that just makes it stick in a way other languages don't. Glad you found your thing so early, that's awesome.