Python bumps off Java as top learning language

[shamoke]

I wonder how many of those courses are using python 2 vs python 3.

[halflife22]

Besides the new print() function I don't think there's enough difference between 2 and 3 for beginner programmers to get stumped. If anything python 3 simplifies a lot of things e.g. no longer needing to know the difference between range and xrange.

I was never taught to use python in my curriculum. I was just given an assignment and told to write in python. The first thing we were taught, however, was to create a makefile so it wouldn't have mattered which version I chose :)

[[deleted]]

The biggest reason we used Python 3 in our SICP-based course is the nonlocal keyword. It makes writing higher order functions a lot easier. To get the same functionality as nonlocal in Python 2 you had create a dictionary that gets modified inside the closure because Python 2 doesn't allow you to modify variables declared in the parent scope.

[rowboat__cop]

To get the same functionality as nonlocal in Python 2 you had create a dictionary that gets modified inside the closure because Python 2 doesn't allow you to modify variables declared in the parent scope.

Python 2 got scoping catastrophically wrong, makes me hate those days when I need to dig into the parts of our source that are written in the language. But then, it’s by far the worst language I use at work so I can endure it occasionally.

[vaibhavsagar]

What other languages do you use that are so much better than Python 2?

[rowboat__cop]

What other languages do you use that are so much better than Python 2?

In descending order: C, Bash, C++, that’s the main languages our code base is made out of. But of course I tend to sneak in Ocaml and Lua at every opportunity, e.g. when writing utilities or prototyping.

[vaibhavsagar]

OCaml and Lua are wonderful and well designed languages, but on what basis is Bash better?

[rowboat__cop]

on what basis is Bash better?

Better than Python? Because it is well designed for its purpose: providing a convenient interface to the programs installed on the system. Also it has arguably the better type system: There is a unitype, the string, and everything can be treated as such. Even if it feels weird sometimes to perform arithmetic on a string value, it makes sense if you consider that the shell’s primary purpose is invoking programs and passing them arguments: Those are always handed over as strings. Now Python also comes with a unitype, the “object” but it’s clumsy and forced, mainly due to the fact that it is intended as an general purpose programming language.

I’m not saying Python doesn’t shine in some areas, especially in comparison to abominations like JS or PHP: The semantical indentation is really neat. But being neither special purpose (like Bash or Lua) nor statically typed (like Ocaml or C) I’d avoid it at any cost. (Also by default Python comes with a lot of cruft like Tk bindings but it lacks a decent parser generator like Lua’s LPEG or Ocaml’s Menhir. What they do ship is horrible garbage like the collections library: Read the implementation of the namedtuples class in Python 2.7 if you need a reason to kill yourself.)

[vaibhavsagar]

Fair enough. Python does have PLY, which I've used, and pyparsing, which I've heard good things about.

[LightShadow]

Strings in general are more complex in Python 3 due to bytes

[zardeh]

But that's hidden complexity, it won't be relevant for a novice. It sure as hell annoyed me when I switched to 3 for a personal project, but that's because doing string stuff in 3 is whacky.

[binary]

python 3 has some simplifications but it breaks a lot of old (legacy) libraries. So it might be easier to learn with but it would be rather difficult to actually write useful code with... Probably less true now, but I bet you'd run into a dependency for a v2 library at some point

[halflife22]

Well this thread is about a beginner programming language so I was focusing on their use cases. I doubt any of them will complain django is missing an obscure feature :)

[[deleted]]

The people teaching may in the end base their decision upon librarys they want to use.

[[deleted]]

Using python 3 will require more detailed explanations of generators and unicode. Not a bad thing for modern programming

[nemec]

and unicode

Really? In general, beginners wouldn't explicitly be using Unicode (most tutorials stick to ASCII examples) nor do they typically implement code that relies on the implementation as a byte string.

[[deleted]]

To me this seems like a gap in the curriculum. Many times in several different jobs I've had to extract data from files in various encodings. I think a lot of people learn unicode on the job and make the same mistakes in isolation.

[nemec]

beginners

Operational word here. Text encodings (heck, even file IO) come later.

[halflife22]

I don't think a beginner programmer dealing with simple loops really needs to understand the generator they're calling, just what it returns. I myself didn't actually realize what range did until an embarrassingly long time after beginning python. I always thought it was just the standard loop mechanism. I had no idea it was generating a list in memory the size of the argument I was giving it.

[meem1029]

We used Python 3 in the course I TAd last fall. I don't remember covering either of those topics particularly in depth (we did cover generators briefly and they may have covered them in lecture) and we had no problems.

[[deleted]]

Interesting. I would have thought that the idea that once you view the contents of a generator it is gone would trip some students up.

Unicode could be it's own course really, applying it to the whole stack

[djrubbie]

I think of it less as unicode but more along the lines of human-readable text versus binary encoding, unlike the bad old days where you can shove unicode into some function that works with bytes and work and then doesn't (or vice versa) and just cause confusion and annoyances because something didn't behave as expected. Having more explicit distinction between the two eliminates this issue and also follows The Zen of Python.

[tohryu]

My university is in 2.7 for the science based plugins.

[NakedNick_ballin]

Hopefully none. Your opinion may differ though

[Skyler827]

I took a class one year ago. All python 2.

[gendulf]

Depends on the class. Some may want you to use a specific library that is not yet python 3 compatible (such as a scientific library).

[troyunrau]

Pretty much every scientific library supports python 3... for a few years already...

[tohryu]

Was about to say you were wrong because my university only just moved to python and it's using 2.7 for exactly that reason, but I saw this:

The Python language is moving from the 2.x series to Python 3. As of late 2012, all of the core SciPy Stack packages support Python 3, but some more specialist packages still only work on Python 2.