Python has brought computer programming to a vast new audience
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Re: Python has brought computer programming to a vast new audience
#2Python is certainly way better for a layman trying to do small things than C++
Re: Python has brought computer programming to a vast new audience
#3Very appropriate timing. My son wanted to learn programming, so we started yesterday with python, using Jupyter notebooks on Azure (notebooks.azure.com). No setup, easy to create little code snippets, and he can do it all from his Chromebook. Python is intuitive, simple, useful; best first language in my opinion.
Re: Python has brought computer programming to a vast new audience
#4I remember hating the whitespace thing so much when I started with Python circa 2.4, but have really come to love the language in a lot of domains since then.
A huge, huge "thank you" to Mr. van Rossum for creating this quirky language that I've become so fond of and for the countless hours of his life he's given to the project.
Re: Python has brought computer programming to a vast new audience
#5Python is certainly way better for a layman trying to do small things than C++
True, but for me that python was my 4th CL (after fortran, c, c++), there were lots of gotchas, specially with implicit type conversions, mutable classes, and passing by value / reference which all seemed quite arbitrary in my first steps.
Maybe for a complete beginner these are no-issues.
Re: Python has brought computer programming to a vast new audience
#6Python is certainly way better for a layman trying to do small things than C++
True, but for me that python was my 4th CL (after fortran, c, c++), there were lots of gotchas, specially with implicit type conversions, mutable classes, and passing by value / reference which all seemed quite arbitrary in my first steps. Maybe for a complete beginner these are no-issues.
Can you explain implicit type conversions problems in python?
Re: Python has brought computer programming to a vast new audience
#7The great advantage of Python is the vast amount of libraries out there for pretty much anything you can think of. As a C# developer that's the one thing, and probably the only, that I envy from Python.
Re: Python has brought computer programming to a vast new audience
#8I remember hating the whitespace thing so much when I started with Python circa 2.4, but have really come to love the language in a lot of domains since then. A huge, huge "thank you" to Mr. van Rossum for creating this quirky language that I've become so fond of and for the countless hours of his life he's given to the project.
from __future__ import braces
I hated the white-space thing until I discovered that. For whatever reason this made me get over myself and learn to love the tab/space argument that is somewhat akin to the vi/emacs argument.
Re: Python has brought computer programming to a vast new audience
#9The great advantage of Python is the vast amount of libraries out there for pretty much anything you can think of. As a C# developer that's the one thing, and probably the only, that I envy from Python.
I really dislike converting Python to a different language. What type is this? Go 5 libraries down to find out ;)
Re: Python has brought computer programming to a vast new audience
#10I remember hating the whitespace thing so much when I started with Python circa 2.4, but have really come to love the language in a lot of domains since then. A huge, huge "thank you" to Mr. van Rossum for creating this quirky language that I've become so fond of and for the countless hours of his life he's given to the project.
from __future__ import braces I hated the white-space thing until I discovered that. For whatever reason this made me get over myself and learn to love the tab/space argument that is somewhat akin to the vi/emacs argument.
I know that now. 2.4 was a long time ago... there is some serious wisdom behind that decision/PEP-8/"import this" that took me a while to appreciate. Humans beings are the weak link in developing software, and language decisions that nudge towards highly readable code are productivity decisions.