Yes, Python is an excellent language for beginners, but so is Ruby in my opinion. Not trolling: why nobody is using Ruby in introductory courses?
Ruby has become almost synonymous with rails, Python is used in more diverse areas.
Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities
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Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities
#52a language without types, without extensive research? Then, why not C/D/Pascal. i strongly believe for universities sml/ocaml/haskell or even rust are far better choices. I prefer sml.
Unless your university is really weird, I can guarantee you will learn many more languages than just the intro language. When I got my computer engineering degree in the early 2000's I was exposed to C, C++, Java, Scheme & Lisp, SPARC & 68k assembly, and even a bit of Python. Learning Python as the intro language instead of C++ would have been much nicer for folks who were completely green to programming.
I would hope that no one in a freshman CS program is "completely green to programming".
Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
SML is great, but based on the UW paradigms course, I'd say it gets a lot of backlash from students wanting something common in industry. Transitioning first classes from C to go would make great sense, but it looks like a lot of schools already replaced C with Java and C++ as first languages. Personally, I do think there is merit in teaching a primarily imperative language first, if only to appreciate other paradigm…
What I took from the Coursera version of the UW course was that SML gets out of the way and let Grossman cover the material at a higher level of abstraction than language syntax. On the other hand, his Programming Languages class is not intended to be introductory. I won't say anything about Python.
I also thought SML worked quite well at that level, but I think the initial negativity on the forums about an unknown language reflected what to expect from a larger portion of 101 students.
> I won't say anything about Python.
I will try to learn from your wisdom.
Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities
#54Hey there! I've just started learning to code for building web apps (I know about Fortran 90, it doesn't fit very well on the browser haha), and it took me a while to decide. I looked up in an endless number of hacker websites, but at the end I'm sorry for betraying Python lovers... I'm learning ruby on rails..! I've just started learning, please tell me If it's best to learn python (I'm not looking for an easy langu…
Welcome to HN! Ruby is a good idea for webdev but keep in mind that Python is also dominant in other domains of computing in particular scripting and scientific computing. So in my opinion for a beginner Python is more future proof than Ruby [activate language-flamewar-prevention-daemon] and if you later add a system-language (e.g. C) and a modern general purpose language (e.g. Haskell or Scheme/LISP) to your repertoire you are in a very good position to tackle most kinds of software development problems.
Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities
#55Python for web development is confusing as a beginner. I would go with PHP since everything is not magic and you can see things right away.
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Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities
#56Yes, Python is an excellent language for beginners, but so is Ruby in my opinion. Not trolling: why nobody is using Ruby in introductory courses?
It's probably some combination of happenstance and various numerical libraries making Python relatively popular in scientific computing before Ruby became well known in the U.S.
Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
rust? please. maybe 3 years from now, once it matures. python is good for teaching programming because it's easy to read - a feature that not a single language you mention can brag about.
It's easy to read and it just makes more sense when someone only knows English. I could show this to my 80 year old grandmother and have her understand what it does with minimal help on my part. word_list = ["hat", "dog", "cat"] for word in word_list: print(word) The same example in Java isn't extremely hard to understand, but it definitely is a decent jump in complexity from the almost plain English syntax of Python…
My first language was AS3.And I'm glad it was.
Types dont make things more complicated. Most languages have types and I prefer dealing with them explicitely rather than letting an interpreter do random coercion like Javascript.
Types lead to cleaner programming,instead of shoving random stuffs into an untyped list,a dev has to think about data structures.
Furthermore,as a non native english speaker,I dont find python more readable than staticaly typed languages like C# or Java.Especially when a codebase grows larger. I wish python was statically typed.
Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities
#58Yes, Python is an excellent language for beginners, but so is Ruby in my opinion. Not trolling: why nobody is using Ruby in introductory courses?
Coursera proglang used ruby for the OOP paradigm. enjoyed it a lot. Python OOP really feels like a bag of bolts, both semantically and syntactically.
Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities
#59IIRC wasn't that the entire motivation behind the creation of Python?
Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities
#60Python was heavily based on ABC, a language which targeted new programers and made syntax choices based on user testing: http://python-history.blogspot.ca/2009/02/early-language-design-and-development.html It says a lot about our understanding of our field that new languages generally do not formally test their syntaxes (and other "mental model" features) for usability.
And this exactly what everyone needs in the beginning.
Simple and clear syntax where you are able to produce results in a short amount of time to keep you interested.
I just remembered some people i learned with who struggled along time to get behind the concept of pointers and how to use them when they thought us c/c++ as an intro language to programming.