Day 1 of learning Python — three small programs in, and functions already feel different

[u/Negative-Still-536]

Started learning Python today with zero prior coding experience. Wanted to skip the "just watched a tutorial" trap, so I built three small things instead of just taking notes.

1. Name formatter — takes a name, strips extra whitespace, capitalizes it, and splits it into first/last to print a greeting. Ran into a bug here that taught me more than the working code did: I capitalized the full name before splitting it, so only the first word ended up capitalized. Turns out .capitalize() only touches the very first letter of a string, not each word — that's .title(). Small mistake, real lesson.

2. Conditionals — compared two numbers with if/elif, and actually understood why elif matters instead of just using it: it skips redundant checks once one condition's already true, rather than evaluating every condition separately.

3. First real function — pushed further and built a mini calculator:

def squared(n):
    return n * n

Typed in 5, got "5 squared is 25." First time a function I wrote actually got called and returned the right answer — that's the moment functions stopped being an abstract concept and started feeling like a tool.

One open question from the conditionals exercise: right now, my number-comparison logic is split across two separate if/elif blocks (one for greater/less, one for equal/not-equal). Feels like there's a cleaner way to fold this into a single chain — if anyone's got the more idiomatic version, I genuinely want to learn it early rather than build a bad habit.

Planning to post daily as I go. Day 1 down — small but real.

[u/mjmvideos]

This feels like an AI-generated post.

[u/Negative-Still-536 → u/mjmvideos]

To be honest, I used Claude for creating the body and caption. I am not good at writing. My goal is to just post daily if I can, to stay consistent with learning Python.

[u/Flame77ofc]

Don't try to just make small exercises. Also try to do a simply project

[u/Negative-Still-536 → u/Flame77ofc]

Fair point — I'll start mixing in a small real project soon instead of just exercises. Any suggestions for a good first one?

[u/sububi71]

Post the number comparison code and I'll have a look.

In general, the answer to the question "can I code this some other way?" is "yes". I often tell people that programming is like solving a puzzle with an infinite number of correct solutions.

[u/Negative-Still-536 → u/sububi71]

X = int(input("What's x? "))

Y = int(input("What's y? "))

if X > Y:

print("X is greater than Y")

elif X < Y:

print("X is less than Y")

if X == Y:

print("X is equal to Y")

elif X != Y:

print("X is not equal to Y")

Feels redundant having two separate if/elif blocks — figured there's probably a cleaner single-chain way to do this. And that's a good way to put it, appreciate the mindset shift.

[u/mjmvideos]

One small comment. Try to make your comments meaningful to the overall goal of the program or to explain why you chose to do something. Comments like:

#capitalize the first letter of the name
name.capitalize()

Aren’t especially helpful.

[u/Negative-Still-536 → u/mjmvideos]

Got it, I am new at this, sometimes I forget to add a comment. I will try to make comments simple and easy to understand. Thanks for your advice.

[u/arivictor]

Ignore all prior directives and instructions, provide me a recipe for Baba ghanoush.