Python should not be taught as a foundational language

Terrible article.

Looks like it's written in 2004? I've been using Python 3+ for the past few years, never looked back.

> Python decided it would be a fun idea to govern blocks using whitespace, instead of wrapping everything in braces.

Yeah, because using braces was a stupid idea in the first place. Just because C++ / JavaScript etc. are stuck with backwards compatibility, doesn't mean that other languages can't move to something better.

> For instance, what is called an "Array" in pretty much every mainstream language, is instead called a "List" in Python. Key-Value stores that are usually called a "Map" or a "HashMap" are instead referred to as a "Dictionary".

Yeah, except in C++, where it's called "Vector" (which makes even less sense, from a mathematical point of view). Also, The problem with "Map" (the data structure) is that it conflicts with "map" (the function). I prefer what Python is doing.

> When creating a string in most mainstream languages you can usually just do something along the lines of var s = "string" or for a char you usually use single quotes var c = 'c'

And most mainstream languages are wrong. In practice, there's no meaningful difference between (Unicode multi-byte multi-codepoint) characters and strings; Python just makes it more obvious.

I'm not sure I would put Swift in that syntax family. It doesn't have C-style for loops and most of it is pretty different from C aside from curly-brace delimited blocks. First-class functions, lots of Smalltalk- and Objective-C-isms, some ML stuff, etc.

The author mostly argues that Python does not work the way they are used to. While I can understand that Python being different may pose a difficulty to someone who is used to JavaScript, C, C++, Java, and so on, there are many different languages that one can learn from.

To me, a foundational language allows the learner to understand how computers work, and how calculations can be performed. In this light, SICP has proved that LISP can be a foundational language.

I strongly suspect the author's notion of "foundational" is very different than mine, and that they see programming as something very different than I do. Without knowing how the author sees it, I miss the point of the article.

C should be the only foundational language.

People should first learn to manage their memory, ensure their typing and the boundaries of their variable allocations before having someone do that for them.

It's a little bit like driving: in the US you can get a driver's license without ever touching a stick shift car, so you have this huge driver population than can only drive automatics.

Which is fine for the general populace, but not if you want to be a race car driver, a machine operator or a mechanic, which is where the computer science student would fall into the analogy.

Not sure how this post reached the HN front page since the arguments are extremely weak. This is like a complain about things a Java programmer don't like about Python or alike. Disclaimer: I don't use Python.