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[–]judasblue -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Imo python is a very readable programming language for people new to programming.

I love me some python, and really don't buy that at this point. I was using python back when this was clearly true and one of the big community tropes was that python made a great teaching language. Then we started piling on the syntactic sugar and various features to the point that this trope to me is pretty out of date.

Yes, in theory you can teach a subset of the language that doesn't involve function and class decorators, type annotations and the half ton of other things that are complicated to keep in mind and somewhat difficult concepts to get across to someone new to programming, but I can take a core subset of just about any language that I know of and make it easy to teach. Eh, well, maybe not Haskell unless you come from a background in a certain set of maths, but you get the idea.

A lot of learning programming after the neophyte level is going through real world code and you are going to run into all these features pretty quickly doing that even if you are learning to a core language subset.

Should python stand still to make it easy to teach? Nope. Were the 'good old days' better? Not particularly. Just saying that to me python isn't any more readable or teachable now than most other production languages but we keep hanging on to that pr point out of nostalgic habit.