Comment by teekert

I have deep respect for Pandas, it, and Jupyter-lab were my intro to programming. And it worked much better for me, I did some "intro to Python" courses, but it was all about strs and ints. And yes, you can add strs together! Wow magic... Not for me. For me it all clicked when I first looped through a pile of Excel files (pd.read_excel()), extracted info I needed and wrote a new Excel file... Mind blown.

From there, of course, you slowly start to learn about types etc, and slowly you start to appreciate libraries and IDEs. But I knew tables, and statistics and graphs, and Pandas (with the visual style of Notebooks) lead me to programming via that familiar world. At first with some frustration about Pandas and needing to write to Excel, do stuff, and read again, but quickly moving into the opposite flow, where Excel itself became the limiting factor and being annoyed when having to use it.

I offered some "Programming for Biologists" courses, to teach people like me to do programming in this way, because it would be much less "dry" (pd.read.excel().barplot() and now you're programming). So far, wherever I offered the courses they said they prefer to teach programming "from the base up". Ah well! I've been told I'm not a programmer, I don't care. I solve problems (and that is the only way I am motivated enough to learn, I can't sit down solving LeetCode problems for hours, building exactly nothing).

(To be clear, I now do the Git, the Vim, the CI/CD, the LLM, the Bash, The Linux, the Nix, the Containers... Just like a real programmer, my journey was just different, and suited me well, I believe others can repeat my journey and find joy in programming, via a different route.)