alt Hacker NewsPython is just such a weird language in general despite its popularity that I honestly cannot recommend anyone who starts programming to choose Python as their first language, contrary to popular sentiments. I mean, I was one of the first person to start using Python when I was in grad school almost a decade ago when everybody else in my field was still using Matlab for their lab code, for the simply reason that Numpy was less awful than Matlab and I needed something that can easily print graphs to PDFs.
The only thing good I can say about Python nowadays is that it's easy to get started for the first five minutes, and then you'll have to deal with all of its weirdness: significant whitespace, truthiness, duck typing, GIL, distribution/packaging, etc, etc.
I was a big fan of Julia as the potential replacement for Python for science for such a long time and I had evangelized it a lot previously, but recently I've been more and more convinced that JIT/multiple dispatch was only good if you already know how to program well to begin with, which for a lot of academics who are not working in computer science, they write quite horrific code. I think it may be better off to skip Python altogether and write your code in a statically typed language to begin with.
Replies
Are academics who are not working in computer science interested in learning statically typed programming languages?
In the past, the usual answer to people who need a programming language but did not want to learn programming was to give them a domain specific language that focused on solving the specific problem they wanted to solve.
> I honestly cannot recommend anyone who starts programming to choose Python as their first language, contrary to popular sentiments
> I think it may be better off to skip Python altogether and write your code in a statically typed language to begin with
Having a good REPL is a huge advantage for beginners (and expert users too), but I'm not aware of any (popular) statically-typed languages with a good REPL.
Despite Python's many faults, it's easy to install (especially on Windows), it has a large standard library, there are third-party packages available for essentially everything, it comes with a user-friendly REPL out-of-the-box, and it gives comprehensible error messages. I'm not really aware of any other (popular) languages with all these attributes.
I hate Python and I'm onboard with putting it down in many ways, but significant whitespace isn't weird in a first programming language. It's only weird if you've absorbed from some other language the convention that whitespace shouldn't be significant.
I think Python remains a very good intro language for getting kids in the door because it doesn’t demand too much tedious stuff, is flexible, and lets people actually solve problems rather than doing computer science.
In my experience the difficulty is understanding what exactly is important when teaching someone something new. And it largely depends on the goals. What you’d teach some biology undergrad is going to be very different from what you teach a bunch of robotics team high schoolers (and no you’re not teaching them the best language for controls and embedded).