Serpents: the Python language and Dragon Dynasty

[banazir]

To all programmers: What do you personally think of Python, the programming langauge?

1. Is it a good teaching langauge?
2. A good general-purpose language?
3. Is it "better" than C/C++ or Java?

How so, and why or why not?

In other news:

Comments

[makingthematrix]

Personally, I find Python a bit... peculiar. On one hand, I think a teaching language should not have a garbage collector. Students have to learn that you should clean up after having a party. If you make them used to languages with garbage collectors, later it will be very hard for them to write in languages which do not have them. Like people who learn Java and then try to write something in C++. Syntax is very similar, inheritance rules are almost the same, everything's right and then... "err, what do you mean by a memory leak"? ;) On the other hand, for a person who learned C++ first, switching to Java is quite simple.
Also, I'd like to point out that I think it's a good practice to teach languages with a C-like and Pascal-like syntax first. These two are the most common among programming languages.
As for the second and the third point: IMHO, Python is good as a general-purpose scripting language, and in this field it can compete with Perl, Lua, and sometimes PHP. For big stand-alone applications I think C/C++ and Java are a

An alternate viewpoint

[taiji_jian]

Well. It is just not true that you lose your affinity when tracking down a bug.

IME, people who dislike white-space delimiting are people who use bad style. Good style demands consistent indentation. It's a logical step for the parser to demand it and make use of it. In practical terms, white-space delmiting is a huge advantage in code legibility, it cuts down on line count, and makes debugging go faster by removing certain kinds of syntax error.

ws = sin

[zengeneral]

White-space should be thrown out at parse time; good style comes from discipline and a language should not try to restrict ones style.

[altamira16]

I had to use it in a graduate school CS course. It was interesting. I thought that the flexibility made it difficult to judge the code by anything other than its output. However, our teacher was laid back and judged it that way. Actually, he hated grading things.

Why Python is Cool

[taiji_jian]

So, as an alternative viewpoint, here is why some people think Python is a great teaching language:

http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/thinkCSpy/preface.htm

[zengeneral]

A good teaching language requires discipline; Python, Java, C$, and others are powerful languages that reward students too early. Students need to be punished for carelessness; they deserve segmentation fauls/general protection errors when they mess up. With medieval thinking, would you let a youngster drive a hummer first? No, you let them drive a wagon, a ford fiesta, or a geo metro; they will learn that their driving influences whether or not they live or die. They will learn that others (library writers) influence there living potential. They learn because they are in a constant state of alert

[mapjunkie]

I disagree that students should work strictly low to high level. In my opinion, they should learn both a low-level (C or assembler) and a high-level language (scheme or lisp) at approximately the same time, such that they can be mentally flexible enough to use whatever language is appropriate to the task. There are certainly some very powerful ideas that they should master that are poor to communicate in C or assembler.

Re: to an extent.

[mapjunkie]

The risk is that they don't realize the need for a new language. One is not only cultivating skills, but cultivating taste.