> Re: "Look, in my experience, you gotta ignore the C++ noise for now..." Totally agree. Since you are on a zero budget, focus on your dev environment. I've tried many IDEs over the years. Go with Microsoft Visual Studio Code because it is lightweight and free, or JetBrains PyCharm Community Edition if you want better out-of-the-box Python debugging. VS Code is probably easier to get going fast. You got this!

Look, in my experience, you gotta ignore the C++ noise for now. Its way too dense for a three-week sprint. Stick to Python but dive deep into the specific libraries instead of just general syntax. You should be living and breathing OpenCV Open Source Computer Vision Library 4.x for the image processing side. For the actual deep learning stuff, most teams I have worked with lately prefer PyTorch Machine Learning Framework 2.0. Its way more intuitive for beginners than TensorFlow, honestly. If your laptop is a potato, dont even try training models locally. Just use the free tier of Google Colab Cloud Research Platform to run your scripts in the cloud. Since you are on a zero budget, go read the free docs for NumPy Numerical Python Library 1.26. Computer vision is basically just manipulating big arrays of numbers... if you master NumPy, you will be miles ahead of other interns who just copy-paste code without understanding the data structures.

Oh my gosh, congrats on the London internship! That is going to be absolutely amazing and you are gonna love it! For a three-week crunch, you definitely need to stick to Python. Seriously, C++ is fantastic for raw speed, but it is a total minefield if you only have a few weeks to prep. You will spend all your time fighting segfaults and memory management instead of actually learning computer vision, which sounds like a total nightmare tbh. Python is just so much safer and more forgiving when you are trying to get things working without breaking the system. I think almost everyone uses Python for prototyping anyway. Someone told me that even the big production systems usually start as Python scripts before they get converted to C++ by the senior engineers later on. IIRC, most of the major computer vision libraries have Python bindings that run super fast anyway because the heavy lifting is already written in C++ under the hood. So you get the safety of Python with the speed of C++ without the headaches! Just focus on getting comfortable with Python syntax and how to manipulate arrays. It is way less stressful and you will actually have working code ready for your first day. Good luck, you are going to do great!