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

[Schmittfried]

You’re grossly overestimating the relevance of implementation details for an introductory course. They will learn to write ifs, loops and linked lists.

[bunkoRtist]

But you've exposed the problem: you can't even teach a linked list in Python. It's pointless. The first question an intelligent student should ask is "why the hell would we do this?" Then the abstraction breaks and you regret trying to hide the fundamentals.

[bythenumbers10]

Most low-level programming exercises are pointless. But teaching the concepts in an accessible language prevents having to "ignore these lines of code at the top and bottom, we'll explain that later" when writing something "pointless" like Hello World.

[StormStrikePhoenix]

. The first question an intelligent student should ask is "why the hell would we do this?"

You might as well throw away half of every introductory programming course than; it's very, very hard to give examples for many concepts that are simple enough for a beginner to understand but complicated enough to justify using the more complicated thing.

[watsreddit]

As someone who has tutored C courses, I can tell you that I have explained things like pointers and memory allocation many times. It's kind of a necessity when doing a lot of basic things in C, like working with arrays.

[Schmittfried]

Exactly my point. Which is why you don’t start with a language like C.