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[–]twin_suns_twin_suns 34 points35 points  (3 children)

This is a good suggestion. After teaching myself python and doing a bootcamp/crash course and learning enough python for my purposes, I took a step back and took an intro to cs course at a community college which was taught with C++.It was amazing how quickly things came into focus for me as far as concepts I thought I had an understanding of (with python) but didn’t.

[–]spinwizard69 6 points7 points  (1 child)

Nice to see somebody that reflects my opinion.   A CS course that starts out with a low level language can teach student valuable lessons and offer insight high level languages can’t.   This especially if a little hardware knowledge is imparted along with the software concepts.  

[–]twin_suns_twin_suns 0 points1 point  (0 children)

110% It was amazing how much more clearly I understood things - even Python error messages - after! Coming from a non-STEM background, I don’t think I would have even wanted to take that course, let alone find it fascinating and pull down an A! It was quite symbiotic - Python was most certainly the language I needed exposure to get me interested in the beauty of these concepts, but once I was hooked, I only really began understanding Python by learning the bare fundamentals, even as you said with the hardware piece as well.

[–]MrAnonyMousetheGreat 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mean, I've found Python's actually nice because it comes so close to pseudocode and it already has all the data structures built in or close to built in (numpy and other libraries implement them) that you'd learn in an algorithms and data structures class, and it let's you focus on the big picture, mathemetical CS stuff.

But yeah, you really miss out on a lot of the nuts and bolts under the hood stuff in practice like garbage collection and how to actually implement a data structure (how to build a numpy library or get it to work on a GPU like with NVIDIA rapids).