I learned a little bit of python back in college with the hope that it would give me a competitive edge in the field I hoped to enter. Lo and behold, I got a job in a different industry entirely and any knowledge of coding I once had became irrelevant.
Would it be worth it to pick up my python textbook again and self-teach in my free time if I don’t want to make a career of coding? What exactly can python be used to create?
I have been programming in Python since about 1998. Switched to Python back then because Fortran was not popular any more, C took to much time when working for a company to be possible, and Excel VBA was frankly slow and clunky. Python got me back into programming stuff… lot of stuff. Instrument control, data analysis, data transformation, some actual modeling, pretty much anything where time to program was more important then speed of execution. If speed is more important use C and vectorize and parallelize. Or if you have enterprise server grade GPUs and compute clusters maybe use GPUs or OpenMPI.
People use to kind of laugh at me for using Python before Python was the thing. I feel vindicated now… but retired before that happened. Saw my boss a year or so ago and pushed him a little. He admitted in a begrudging way that, yes you were right. I was just a couple of decades early.