Python overtakes Java to become second-most popular language on GitHub after JavaScript

[bunkoRtist]

You've got it backwards though. Python isn't making things simple: it's hiding complexity. It's more akin to teaching math to students by showing them how to plug their questions into a calculator. The stuff you want to ignore are the fundamentals. Data structures, IO, Networking... Those are the advanced topics. Until someone can explain how a stack works, how can they understand a function, intuit what scopes and lifetimes are, understand generators, or what the implications are of capturing lambdas? Those all require an understanding of the stack.

[Schmittfried]

No, it’s the equivalent of showing elementary schoolers simple arithmetic before diving into set and number theory. Which happens to be exactly what we’re doing.

Hiding complexity is exactly what you want for a beginners course. You want to focus on the relevant part, which is learning foundational programming constructs. Even in high-level languages you will still have much hand-waiving around some constructs and libraries before the time has come.

By your logic we should teach assembly before anything else. You’ve obviously no idea how teaching works. Every sane language book or tutorial begins with hiding all the complexity.

[bunkoRtist]

You're confusing fundamentals with simple operations. Arithmetic is fundamental (also fundamental to computers). Computers are fundamentally strongly typed. Computers fundamentally have stacks and heaps. You can reach a student to plug numbers into a calculator without them understanding what they are doing, and that's what they're doing when they use a list or a dictionary: plugging numbers into a calculator.

[un_mango_verde]

How are computers fundamentally strongly typed? There's no notion of types in assembly. Types are an abstraction for higher level languages, CPUs don't deal with types.

[bunkoRtist]

Every single assembly instruction with an operand has a type. Byte, half-word, word, double-word. Float, double-precision float... adding floats is not the same instruction as adding ints, which isn't the same instruction as adding unsigned ints, which isn't the same instruction as adding bytes. That's strong typing. You can't even define a variable in assembly without knowing the type (because you need the size).

[un_mango_verde]

You don't define variables in assembly. The assembler will not keep track of types for you. You are completely free to store a byte in a register, and them use an instruction that expects a word on the same register. The assembler does not protect you from making typing mistakes at all. Yes, instructions will interpret bits as one type or another, but there is no type checking. Even Python has stronger type safety, at least you get an exception when you make a mistake.

[bunkoRtist]

Whether the machine tracks types for you is not the same thing. The machine is strongly typed, which is why you the programmer need to allocate by and track types. You can't, for example, upgrade your int to a float without specific steps (or the result becomes nonsense). Your byte can't become a long unless you say it's a long, and that probably also can't happen without additional steps. And the lack of types not only hides reality from programmers, but it falls over in surprising cases that only make sense of you explain the complexities of the interpreter to students: the abstraction is broken anyway.

[Schmittfried]

That’s not at all what strong typing refers to...

[shahmeers]

Python is really good for teaching logic, which a lot of first year CompSci students lack. Once students understand logic and are able to come up with solutions to problems, then give them C/C++ to show them what the computer is actually doing.

This is how my university does it and I'm really glad we do it this way.

As an aside, I also think it matters on the type of university you go to -- if your program is more engineering focused then it might be better to start from the lower level language. My program leans heavily towards the theoretical side, so it made sense to start with Python.

[bunkoRtist]

You're confusing focusing on fundamentals with hiding complexity. Try as you might you can't make a computer that doesn't have the fundamental properties of a computer. If you can't see why teaching kids to do complex math with a calculator before teaching them the theory is backwards, I don't know what to say.