My first Python project took me 3 weeks and it was just a calculator

Last month I finally sat down to learn Python after putting it off for like a year. I followed this tutorial and built a simple calculator that adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides numbers. It crashed every time someone tried to divide by zero until I figured out try and except blocks. Three weeks for something that basic felt bad at first but now I see how much I actually learned about debugging and logic. Has anyone else spent way too long on a beginner project that seemed simple?

2 comments

2 Comments

sean_torres7119d ago

I used to think if you couldn't crank out a project in a weekend then you were wasting time. That changed after I spent two weeks on a script that just renamed a bunch of files. Felt stupid at first but the mistakes taught me more than any tutorial ever did. A calculator in three weeks is solid, you actually learned the hard stuff.

williamb2919d ago

My buddy spent like five weeks on a program to sort his comic book collection by year and publisher. He kept breaking the CSV file until he learned about encoding. By the time he was done he could talk your ear off about Python dictionaries and how they work with lists. Sometimes the stupid stuff teaches you the most, in my experience.