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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

#141

Post by iainnash »

pyfish wrote: post #125
franparga95 wrote: post #32

Hey 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…

Python/Django and Ruby/Rails are both clean frameworks and have fantastic communities. When I did the "Hello world" on both I was drawn to Python/Django. When it comes to moving away from the framework I tend to like Python more than Ruby. But it's just personal preference.

In addition, I feel like python tends to have a more consistent, but somewhat more verbose API in libraries and for frameworks such as web development frameworks. A strength and a problem that ruby has over python is that the syntax and language are more flexible, which both makes it harder to debug but also faster to develop and prototype in as compared to python.

Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities

#142

Post by yminsky »

pgbovine wrote: post #136
blahedo wrote: post #75

This methodology is suspect, and the headline is extremely deceptive. Note that Guo has conflated CS0 (meaning: CS for non-majors) with CS1 (meaning: intro to CS major). He is upfront about this fact and he does it intentionally, but comments about "first officially-sanctioned exposure in college" and such make it sound like he's unaware that most CS majors do not ever take a CS0 course; and among instructors of CS,…

Author here. Thanks for your comments blahedo. I'm a bit short on time right now, but I will convert some parts of this response into more coherent form and edit my article accordingly to clarify. I'll address each of your paragraphs in turn: 1.) Re: CS0 vs. CS1. Like you mentioned, I was very upfront about the methodology for this analysis. And I am very aware that most CS majors do not ever take a CS0 course. But p…

ML (OCaml and SML) seems to get short shrift in your analysis. CS51 at Harvard is in OCaml. Brown's cs017 is OCaml, Scheme, Scala and Java. Penn's CS120 is OCaml (I think. It definitely used to be, but I can't find the course online anymore. You can reach out to Benjamin Pierce to ask, though.) And CMU has an SML-based FP course as part of their intro sequence

None of this is to deny the fact that Python is highly popular as an intro language.

Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities

#143

Post by donatj »

Igglyboo wrote: post #89
shire wrote: post #33

Python 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.

They're majoring in CS not Web Development. PHP doesn't really do anything other than web dev which makes it a poor fit for a general purpose CS curriculum.

> PHP doesn't really do anything other than web dev This is such a complete misconception. Command line apps written in PHP are becoming increasingly popular, not to mention the fact that PHP runs everywhere.

Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities

#144

Post by icambron »

stepstep wrote: post #139
icambron wrote: post #109

I've always been of two minds about this. My intro course at MIT was in Scheme, a class that has since been renamed and is now taught using Python. On the one hand, it was a great course, and the FP was an awesome mindfuck (previous programming experience: TI BASIC). Though I took it all for granted at the time, it definitely set me up to think about programming better for years, and I still reread the book sometimes…

MIT grad here. I took the new course (6.01) 5 years ago, but I'm reasonably familiar with SICP. They are _very_ different. 6.01 has an emphasis on robotics and AI, probably because it's supposed to be an intro to EE as well as CS. SICP is more focused on the semantics of programming languages and the power of abstraction. 6.01 teaches some of the latter, but with some OOP mixed in. But it also teaches circuits, discr…

Telling me that the class I think of as "new" has been around that long makes me feel old. Point taken that they're just fundamentally different classes, not just the same class using a different language medium. 6.001 had some OOP in there too, actually (you ended up building your own OOP impl in Scheme; it was kinda neat), but otherwise I agree with your characterization of SICP. I definitely see the value of 6.01's approach (especially since the other 6.0x classes are also different from the 6.00x classes), but I can't help but feel like that really solid exploration of programming fundamentals is crucial, and something important has been lost. So maybe this is less about Scheme and me just lamenting the loss of 6.001. (I do hear you can take 6.001 over IAP, and of course you can always learn it on your own, so I get that a lot of this is just me being attached to a formative experience.)

Edit: some additions for clarification

Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities

#145

Post by honksillet »

zo1 wrote: post #122
micahasmith wrote: post #63

In college our intro classes were in C++. While its a tough language I do wonder if it was advantageous to forcefully learn about 1) value vs reference types via pointers and 2) how allocation maps into memory space. Not having that level of depth kinda worries me

For 90+% of the problems out there, a business programmer doesn't need to know anything about memory#. Short of a few rules, I don't see why they can't ever go without learning about memory space, allocation, reference types, etc. They will make mistakes, sure. But they will get the work done, and that's pretty much what most businesses need. Eventually, as problems creep in, the messes created by lack of knowledge g…

10% ends up being a huge amount.

Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities

#146

Post by dgacmu »

arihant wrote: post #82

CMU transitioned from Java to Python when I was an upperclassman there. I'm not sure what other similar places do, but CMU splits introductory courses into 2 parts - 110, 112. 110 is the basic programming with gradual intro to OOP and stuff. 112 is where the datastructures come in - it's a programming primer to implementing datastructures and algorithms, so to speak. Here is the issue I feel goes unnoticed as most pe…

Speaking as one of the people who helped lead the push for moving to Python in 15-110 and 15-112, the reduction of OOP was extremely deliberate.

At the end of the day, Python won because it could be used to express programming concepts quite clearly in both an imperative and, to a slightly limited degree, functional manner, in ways that were appropriate for a variety of domains. And it did it in a way that substantially reduced the "boilerplate" syntax burden, which most of us take for granted, but is a large pain for newcomers to programming.

print "hello, world"

is very easy for a beginner.

Depending on what your background is,

[(i*3) for i in [1, 2, 3]]

may be a very clear way to multiply every element of an array by 3. Or it may be confusing as heck. :)

Our general hope is that by the time our current first years make it through the program that there will be even less of an emphasis on OOP needed. C0, for example, introduces an additional component of formal reasoning, and my shift of 15-440 replaced C++ with Go, which has a modestly less "OOP"-centric flavor. The big drawback now is that the transition from 110/112 to the formality of C0 and the functional intro with ml is rather jarring. That's partly by design, to get people to think about computer science differently than what they might have learned about "programming" in high school, but we'll see if we can optimize it.

(I'm posting about this because I'll be teaching 15-112 with David Kosbie next Spring.)

Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities

#147

Post by BuckRogers »

Stubb wrote: post #115
advocaat23 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reperto…

> So in my opinion for a beginner Python is more future proof than Ruby Which is more future proof: Python v2 or Python v3? I figured that I was least likely to regret Ruby for a green-field data analysis project. So far it's been a delightful experience.

Either. They're not really that different from the other. I use 2, but I've used 3.. no issues. It will be an easy move as an enduser programmer when Python3's time in the sun arrives (and it may never).

Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities

#148

Post by pgbovine »

yminsky wrote: post #142
pgbovine wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. Thanks for your comments blahedo. I'm a bit short on time right now, but I will convert some parts of this response into more coherent form and edit my article accordingly to clarify. I'll address each of your paragraphs in turn: 1.) Re: CS0 vs. CS1. Like you mentioned, I was very upfront about the methodology for this analysis. And I am very aware that most CS majors do not ever take a CS0 course. But p…

ML (OCaml and SML) seems to get short shrift in your analysis. CS51 at Harvard is in OCaml. Brown's cs017 is OCaml, Scheme, Scala and Java. Penn's CS120 is OCaml (I think. It definitely used to be, but I can't find the course online anymore. You can reach out to Benjamin Pierce to ask, though.) And CMU has an SML-based FP course as part of their intro sequence None of this is to deny the fact that Python is highly po…

Thanks, will look into those and update accordingly. However, Harvard CS51 doesn't count as CS1 since CS50 is already its CS1 course. (But please correct me if I'm wrong.)

Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities

#149

Post by rakoo »

micahasmith wrote: post #63

In college our intro classes were in C++. While its a tough language I do wonder if it was advantageous to forcefully learn about 1) value vs reference types via pointers and 2) how allocation maps into memory space. Not having that level of depth kinda worries me

> Not having that level of depth kinda worries me

I see 2 domains where this level of depth matters:

- performance (speed, resource consumption) - security

If you're not doing one of those, you shouldn't have to care about them, especially if this is your first programming language ever.

Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities

#150

Post by BuckRogers »

Alupis wrote: post #29
Igglyboo wrote: post #15

I think Python is the perfect first language for beginners. Yea we all know it's not fast or low level or the best language to teach about types or advanced CS topics etc. But it is extremely readable and easy to understand, it makes coding fun and once the students are engaged and know the basics it is much easier to teach more advanced concepts like typing and memory allocation.

Couple of thoughts: 1) I hope they are teaching Python 3.x instead of 2.7.x. 2) A good portion of the schools cited in the Appendix are not "computer" schools. UC Davis for example, is the last place I would attend for a CS degree (I know many students at UC Davis -- it's much better suited for other degrees). 3) My school (CSU Sacramento) does not even offer any Python courses, but there's a lot of Java and C course…

"1) I hope they are teaching Python 3.x instead of 2.7.x."

Not me. Are you a professional Python programmer for your day job? I don't think it matters what they're teaching as far as version. As an enduser programmer the difference really isn't that significant (not worth a breaking change in the language at least). But whether they learn 2 or 3, they'll be able to move to the other without any major issue.

I would recommend anyone pick 2 over 3 at this point in time. Everything that says 'Python' supports 2 so there's just never any worries or concerns there.

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