Spending time trying to contribute to open source Android applications really brings me a lot of empathy for new Python users.
I barely understand what I’m doing. The packaging ecosystem seems complicated and I don’t understand it. When I try and upgrade versions a bunch of stuff breaks. The documentation refers to a bunch of stuff I don’t understand, and seems relevant only to newer code bases.
Not that I think that there’s something we or they could be doing a ton better. I’m sure there are reasons for why it’s all confusing and disorienting.
This is the one place where ChatGPT has seemed useful to me, by the way. When I try and use it for anything Python-related, it’s worse than useless because I know Python stuff way better than ChatGPT, and it’s faster for me to just do it myself anyway.
When I’m trying to get a handle on super basic questions, ChatGPT seems to be kind of OK at explaining things in such a way as to unblock me.
@pganssle Definitely. I've been mucking about with Vue.js+TypeScript for a side project lately (my first serious foray into JS), and ChatGPT has helped me multiple times to identify a good idiom as a starting point for actually implementing what I needed.