Retiring Python as a Teaching Language

Wouldn't something like pyjs (http://pyjs.org) solve all of the author's concerns, while still teaching Python?

There are other languages that run in a browser and might be suitable for teaching. How about Dart or Scratch?

> This makes the false assumption that resources put into Python 3 somehow prevented "native browser support,"

Agreed, browser support was probably unrealistic.

However other points still stand.

Python 3 was a mistake. It at the wrong time (too late), and didn't bring enough. The talks, and the time, and drama around it weren't worth to get dict comprehension and unicode support.

A 10x speed improvement (heck, just a 2x) would have been. Better IO handling via something sane like lightweight threads (via an already existing framework like gevent or eventlet). Better packaging. Better default GUI library. Refresh the standard library with something like requests, ipython...

Python had a golden opportunity and it squandered it. There were

>It's a game of tradeoffs, same as everything else in nature, isn't it?

My question is if tradeoffs are inherent in programming language design (some mathematical inevitability) or due to lack of resources and other "real world" concerns that can be overcome given enough care and money.

I'm not convinced by anything that I've seen that we don't just have the latter.

E.g. one could say in 1995 "JS is an awful language for development, and it's unsuitable for anything that needs to be fast. It's an inevitable tradeoff, use the right language for that etc".

And then the big corps got interested in optimizing JS, and we can now write full 3D games, and even video encoding in it, and we have asm.js and the like that take the performance of JS 2-3x worse than C for most things, as opposed to 100 times worse back in the day.

And we got node in the server side, and tons of libs etc. And with ES6/7 we get tons of language improvements.

Even the "fundamental" issues with JS, like bizarro type coercion, global by default, no integer types etc, could be corrected, it's just compatibility concerns that makes us not fix them, not some inherent impossibility of getting a great language without those issues.

Heck, we could even introduce optional gradual typing for JS, if it wasn't for those backward compatibility concerns, and even AOT compilers to native code.

Those things maybe wouldn't make JS perfect and useful for everything, but it would make it an order of magnitude better than what it is.

And if we started from scratch, without all those compatibility constraints at all, we could get a new language pretty close to perfect with enough money and a great team.

>...and those are already some key decisions you made that reflect what's important to you personally. Every time you choose one of these properties, you open doors and close others behind you.

What door exactly closes? In the "mathematic necessity" way, not the "some people only like dynamic typing" way.

Because the thing under discussion was wether a language good for everything (or close to it) could be produced.

I chose those attributes not because I like them personally, but with this end goal in mind. Namely:

1) Without static types, you can't get the last mile of performance and safety checks, for using it for high performance apps and systems programming. They also help having a better IDE experience (autocomplete, suggestions etc) for those who like that.

2) If the types are not infered the language will feel too verbose and weighty to people wanting to use it for quick scripts and the like.

>you should also recognize that you are doing exactly the same thing as every single language designer in history.

Well, I don't have any beef with any language designer in history.

My basic problem with current languages is not that they made some choices, but that they didn't make some additional work they could PILE ON TOP of the previous choices and get much better.

I'll be the first to admit that ES6 is nicer than Python in terms of the language itself. But I feel like it's still going to take years of heavy lifting to get the same level of high quality libraries, web frameworks, learning resources, etc. And it's hard for me to see js replacing Python as the obvious choice for beginners until that happens. It might be more fun to code in than Python, which is probably at least in part why there is more js code being written on github, but the larger ecosystem still seems like kind of a mess.