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Broke my brain on my first ever for loop and stared at the screen for 40 minutes
Last Tuesday I was doing a free Python course on my lunch break and tried to print all the even numbers from 2 to 20 with a for loop. I typed range(2, 20, 2) and got 2 through 18, which was fine, but then I wanted 20 too and sat there like a rock for 40 minutes before my coworker Dave said "dude, just put 21." I felt so dumb and also kind of mad, because no tutorial ever explained that the stop number doesn't get counted, they just hand you the answer and move on. Honestly the off by one thing is the meanest trick in beginner coding and I think every course should hammer it on day one. Did any of you get wrecked by range() when you started, or was it just me?
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nina_butler9h ago
Did your coworker at least buy you a coffee after that? I read somewhere that the off by one thing trips up pretty much every beginner, it's like a rite of passage (my own version was trying to count to 10 with range(10) and getting 0 through 9). Once it clicks though you never forget it.
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