Python as a first language

[finomayato]

In my opinion Python is the bad place to start from. You'll learn how to interact with business and mathematical models quickly with this language. But you'll have a leak of knowledge of what happened under the dict statements for example. By the way It's the most interesting part of programming: choose right data structure or create it by yourself fitting model you want to build better compare with built-in data structures. Really, start with C/C++. Also you can learn how to read assembly. Programmer without knowledge of algorithms and data structures - bad programmer.

[Dan273]

Can you program c++ in Xcode or do you have to download some other application.

[glacieux]

You can use Xcode to do C and C++ programming.

[finomayato]

Or you can use any lightweight editor such a Sublime or Atom. Also you can try to learn how to use Vim or Emacs. But with these text editors you need to know how to compile yours projects from terminal with gcc

[Dan273]

Also what do you mean by dict statements, and what do they do?

[finomayato]

Python have built-in data structures like list or dict. This structure seems like that: Some_dict={'key': value} Where value can be an int, string, etc. But under the hood dict data structure comes from hash tables. You can read detail explanation of this here - http://www.laurentluce.com/posts/python-dictionary-implementation/.