A good friend was working in a scientific model for controlling weeds on farms. He couldn't code so he asked me to make it into a program: "it is very simple, only 8 steps at most". The 8 steps turned out to be a 2000 lines code after 6 months of work. Later he changed the model a few times and added a few new steps. We could only finish the prototype 16 months after starting, and after a few rewrites, with 3500 lines. Now we're on our way to launch. The model was very complex itself, and each of those steps was a rabbit hole. To add to that, I was not a professional programmer and had never touched Python, so it was a very challenging journey.
I did a teamtreehouse or codeacademy course on Python maybe 6 or 7 years ago, but that was all - not even a single project. Mainly my programming experience existed because when I was a teenager I would create scripts for ultima online using EUO [0] and a few times Simba[1]. Also I managed an ecommerce operation for a few years, so I dealt with coders and eventually code.
Actually, I started this project in VBA after my partner insisted on it because he had those sheets with all the parameters for the model already in excel, and also a GUI he had created for the input. I accepted because I had taken a course on it @ uni, but soon felt the need for an easier way to program, and that's when I decided to go to Python.
My bad for not being precise: I had to learn Python specifically for this project because the only memory I had about the course was: "Python bare basics were easy to learn". I had never even installed python locally or anything and saw those courses at the time as only games to get some minimum idea about the language, as I had no intended use for it.
Adding to this topic, now I can say it was easy enough, even for someone like me. A few times I needed help from actual people and got it from the kind and amazing folks that hang around StackOverflow Python chat, but mostly Python docs (or some simplified form of it provided by other website) and google queries would do the job when I had a code obstacle. Python was overall very intuitive for me, apart from a few surprises (mainly regarding scopes and names).
