A week or two back, I started doing an online course for Python. May as well have a tenuous grasp of another language, right? To start, they had me install a thing — I suppose it is an IDE — called Anaconda, which actually seems very nice and easy. However, it has definitely done something to my established environment, because when I went to run my weekly stats script, I got a bunch of errors saying it couldn’t find things that it had been perfectly well able to find before I installed Anaconda.
Doing anything interesting through Anaconda is still way above my pay grade. I’d like to just be able to disable the environment it seems to have set up until I need it, but even that is beyond me for the moment.
In any case, searching online offered a couple of ways to tell the stats script where to look for those modules. None of them worked, for me, and I think I tried everything. I let the whole thing ride until today, when I put off a very boring job by fixing this problem. Encouraged by an online friend, I took a deep breath and typed cpan install Modern::Perl.
Me: Progress! Now there's something else it can't find, which is fine. I'll just keep iterating until I succeed or get a different error.
My friend: yep, that's exactly what everyone does when there are missing libraries 😊
So now maybe I’m a step further along the path to understand this stuff. Or, if not understand, at least use it. And the Python course must be doing some good; note the highly technical use of “iterating”.
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