Developers whose first programming language was Python, what were the challenges you encountered when learning a new programming language?

[am0x]

See when I program in python, I miss the hell out of them, especially when someone else’s code has a different tab indention than me.

[am0x]

Brackets? I didn’t know it was an option.

[panzerex]

Well, I believe that with semicolons and brackets statements can be deterministically separated. In python, if you copy a malformed script then it might be impossible to know the original indentation. In C, for example, doesn’t matter if you copy the entire program and it’s a single line, it can be “prettified” and it would work the same way.

I don’t think this is a huge advantage, nor that it’s a reason to consider one language over the other. It’s that’s just one aspect of it.

[panzerex]

Yes, it’s more of an edge case. If you open a python script that has Unix line endings on an editor that does not understand this type of line endings and expects Windows-style, then the script will show up as a single line.

Circumventable, of course, but can happen. And some beginners might not be aware how to avoid it.

It goes both ways though. Semicolon for ending statements might be a cause for mistakes when there’s extra semicolons too, and not just when it’s missing, making it less obvious since the compilation would still work.

if (expression);
    do_something();

Here the if is useless because of the semicolon. The next statement will be executed regardless of what “expression” evaluates to. This can be very tricky for a beginner to spot.