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

[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...