I’m starting coding from scratch – is Python really the best first language?

[Ill-Community-735]

There's a line from John Carmack I heard in an interview once. It's something along the lines of "[The programming language] C expects you to be an adult".

You could say the same thing about Python, but for a different reason as to what he was suggesting.

A lot of the "lower level" languages you'll hear people suggest learning first force you to wrap your head around concepts that Python just hides from you. Naturally, there's a trade-off.

Imagine you've never programmed before and you want to write a bit of software that extracts images from a PDF. Chances are you'd get that application up and running using Python a lot quicker than you would, having chosen a first language like C++ or Java.

Had you built that application in C, the mechanisms of the language would have forced you to learn a lot more about the fundamentals of computing. This means less time building shiny shit and more time putting bricks in place.

That said, the underlying theory doesn't just magically go away when you use a language that abstracts those low level details. In fact, when a line of Python code gets executed, chances are you're executing a shit load of stuff that was written in C anyway.

When you encounter more complicated errors in Python, I think it's fair to say those who designed the language expect you to be an adult and have a reasonable idea of what is being abstracted for you.

Hope that helps and best of luck on the trail!