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What's the dumbest reason you've learned a programming language? (self.programming)

submitted 4 months ago by andioop to c/programming

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (29 children)

I'm curious why you think Python is unsuitable. Both of my kids picked up Python pretty easily.

[–] SmartmanApps 18 points 4 months ago (28 children)

object-oriented (this is their FIRST proper programming language - they don't even know how to write loops yet and you want us to teach them OOP at the same time?! And as it turns out, I had one student who literally could NOT work out how to use a loop - kept writing 20 variables for 20 iterations. i.e. her variables never varied!)
variables are weakly-typed (use it for anything, whether it's what you first used it for or not, Python doesn't care)
indentation has to be exact (i.e. no brackets, just exact indentation). I had one student whose program wasn't working, and it even took ME a while to find what was wrong with it (a missing space).

I think there was more, but that's what I remember off the top of my head. If it was up to me then I would've used Pascal - that's what it's designed for! But at least C# has strongly-typed variables, and doesn't care about your indentation (and unfortunately there was no non-OOP language choice available - I'm not sure how this got in the curriculum when every teacher knows you only teach one concept at a time). As I said, many other teachers felt the same way, but couldn't get it past their school admin's.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (3 children)

You can use types in Python and your tools will generate warnings

def something(a: int) -> int: return "potato"

will turn yellow in an IDE more advanced that notepad.

Most editors will also show a red line where the indentation is wrong.

[–] SmartmanApps 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Most editors

Same thing still applies - you need to get it past the school admin gatekeeper.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

If you're writing any language in like notepad, you're going to have a bad time. I accept your point that school administration may be making questionable choices about what software is installed, but that's not a problem unique to python.

[–] SmartmanApps 3 points 4 months ago

that’s not a problem unique to python

No, but it's a bigger problem for C# than is is for Python (though this is changing now), so all the U.K.-based schools were teaching Python, rather than the more-appropriate C#. That was my original point - that's the dumb reason I had to learn Python, school admin's wanted the lower overhead of the worse language.

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