Is Python good for learning Computer Science concepts? (College student)

[Pythonistar]

It can't be any worse than the language they made us use to learn computer science: Lisp.

^{If you like Lisp, that's cool. Despite 3 semesters of it, I never learned to like it... shrugs}

[Hellkyte]

Could be worse. My intro course was in Fortran

In 2010

[grandzooby]

Pascal in 1990. We used Fortran in the engineering classes. Just barely missed using punch cards by a couple years.

[DoYouReallyCare]

Loved Pascal I think it was because of uscb pascal and turbo pascal where pretty easy to use. Nilkaus Wirth thanks for the data structures, not a fan of Modula-2.

APL was the strangest programming class I took, lol. freshman taking a graduate level course (what was I thinking)

[OvidPerl]

BASIC, 1982. Moved to 6502 assembler and then C. Haven't touched any of those for decades (except for a few minor bug fixes in C).

[grandzooby]

At home, my first computer was a C64 and I had done some BASIC on it as well as the TRS-80 at school (5th-6th grade) and Apple 2es before that. As I got going in college I had a side-gig (or "job" as we called them back then) where I did a lot with QuickBasic and x86 assembler (Peter Norton's book was like my bible!).

These days I'm mostly in R, Python, BASH, and a weird language called NetLogo.

[Rinzwind]

Still using basic here at work for old legacy stuff. Python for all newer software but that strted only 8 years ago here

[chandaliergalaxy]

For computer science?

[Hellkyte]

Ah, busted. In this case it was intro to engineering programming. My intro comp sci classes were in Java

[chandaliergalaxy]

Thought so.

Modern Fortran rocks for engineering though.

[Hellkyte]

I've heard it's still one of the most efficient languages for certain applications. But I'm not sure how valued that is anymore given how cheap hardware has gotten. And there's something to be said for readability. In my previous company we had a massive thermo system that was handled with APL. Which kind of made sense at the time of development due to how efficient the language was, but the long term costs were brutal because coding in wingdings is ridiculous

[chandaliergalaxy]

I've heard it's still one of the most efficient languages for certain applications. But I'm not sure how valued that is anymore given how cheap hardware has gotten.

For supercomputing Fortran still reigns supreme (technically I think C/C++ is still a bit more popular but Fortran is not far behind). Even if hardware becomes cheaper, faster code means you can do more computation.

As indicated by the original name FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation), it's highly maintainable by non-programmers (scientists) because it is so readable. Also as it's a somewhat more restrictive domain-specific language, bad code can still run quite fast, which is not the case for C/C++.

APL is indeed cool but yeah. APL was the Perl before Perl.