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Python seems like a nice update to what BASIC was in the 8-bit era. Real-time interpreter so you get instant feedback, including very simple imperative syntax.
by Kadin 8y ago
Python seems like a nice update to what BASIC was in the 8-bit era. Real-time interpreter so you get instant feedback, including very simple imperative syntax. (IMO any introductory programming environment that doesn't let you do something like 10 PRINT BUTTS <RET> 20 GOTO 10 <RET> and get BUTTS BUTTS BUTTS... out of it is a failure to launch.)
But unlike BASIC, Python will grow with you and you can use it for non-trivial projects without fighting with the language. I certainly wish my old Apple II had Python; it would have prevented the immense jump to a "real" programming language, because I kept trying to go from AppleSoft BASIC to C and banging my head into a wall, nothing about it made any sense. (Perhaps I would have had better luck going from BASIC to Pascal or QBasic, but for some reason I never thought to try it. I think because the very few computer-literate adults I knew were minicomputer people and led me to believe that C was the only thing worth learning.)
Not that working up from a text prompt is the only way to learn how to interact with computers, certainly. I know a fair number of people who learned to program due to environments like HyperCard, which are much more visual, and let you start with the art and storytelling and then glue things together with code, rather than start from the code.
But for some people, including myself, the feeling of interacting directly with a computer via a simple prompt, and making it do things each time I pressed the Return key, was quite powerful.
- tajen 8y agoI too regret staying for 12 years on GW/Visual Basic and never finding my path to C. How to start a programming career slowly...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dTal 8y ago>MO any introductory programming environment that doesn't let you do something like 10 PRINT BUTTS <RET> 20 GOTO 10 <RET> and get BUTTS BUTTS BUTTS... out of it is a failure to launch. But Python doesn't let you do that - there's no goto... While I'm being somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I do think it's true that while true: print("BUTTS") carries quite a bit more conceptual overhead than the BASIC equivalent, and is not exactly a "very simple imperative syntax". You don't have the simplistic and obvious "goto" - instead you have the ungrammatical and obtuse "while true". And then there's the indentation, the colon, and the parentheses around the argument to print... all explainable of course, but all requiring explanation. To fully grok it you need to understand booleans and conditions, block structure, and function calls. Of course it's all perfectly obvious to experienced eyes but remember the mountain you have to climb when you're first starting out - more than one or two seemingly inexplicable things when you're first starting out can be very discouraging. Worse, to my mind, is the loss of that small moment of enlightenment regarding complex behavior emerging from computer programs - with 10 PRINT BUTTS : 20 GOTO 10 you are composing two atomic, individually obvious statements to create something more - an infinite loop. When one of the statements is a slightly more complex line that essentially means "do an infinite loop", some of that magic is lost.