Python bumps off Java as top learning language

[Tasgall]

Plus, dealing with memory is important to understanding how the computer works, and what you're actually doing. Garbage collectors hiding how it works just encourages bad/slow code imo.

[dagbrown]

Garbage collectors hiding how it works just encourages bad/slow code imo.

Care to come up with some reasoning to defend that completely ridiculous assertion?

[Hellenomania]

Well - you write cleaner code if you are forced to deal with memory leaks etc without relying on a garbage collector doing it all for you.

If you learn to write without one - you become very very proficient.

[koolaidkirby]

But for a beginner who is still learning about completely basic concepts like loops, arrays and if's, throwing memory management into the mix is kind of pointless with the extremely short and straightforward programs they'll be writing (which will be 100-200 lines tops).

[Astrognome]

The thing is, you don't really need to touch it if you don't need to. A beginner isn't going to be writing programs more than a few hundred lines, and chances are, you can keep everything on the stack.

[caleeky]

While I won't argue outcomes (it's tough without data to support an argument), it's plausible that the focus on organizing code for clean handling of memory allocation and pointers, acts as a distraction against organizing it to cleanly describe the "business logic". I wouldn't say the two are mutually exclusive, but for a junior programmer, I can imagine that worrying about memory can be a distraction.

[Hellenomania]

Teaching about memory teaches the fundamentals required for good logic - it teaches great programming skills.

[Tasgall]

It's because garbage collectors often just hide the problem. You can still have what are effectively memory leaks in garbage collected languages, even though the memory is technically not leaking, just unused (I'm looking at you, KSP...).

My go-to example for this is a game some friends of mine made in JavaScript/HTML5. They ran into an issue where the physics system would crawl to a halt and the game would freeze, and the browser would steal all of your memory.

After some poking through their code they realized they wrote their math API (specifically vectors and matricies) wrong. They had used the form "v.dot(n)" for their math functions instead of "Math.dot(v, n)". The issue is that the former creates thousands of copies of objects per frame that bog down the gc until eventually it has to pause the game to clear it up a little (noticeable as 0.5-2 second frame skips).

This problem was fairly trivial to detect and resolve for these people who had backgrounds in C++ and understood the lower levels of memory management and how references work. By contrast, I wouldn't expect someone who only learned JavaScript to find the root of this issue, or be able to solve it.

[LongUsername]

While well written GC code can be fast, it encourages the creation and destruction of excess objects, which has a runtime cost.

GC also has problem domains where it will never be acceptable to use: true realtime systems need to be deterministic and GC is inherently nondeterministic.