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I learned Python as my first TRUE(explain later) language and I will be forever grateful for it. Now I am a polyglot, jumping through multiple languages all th

I learned Python as my first TRUE(explain later) language and I will be forever grateful for it. Now I am a polyglot, jumping through multiple languages all the time, be it Python/Java/Javascript, or occasionally flirtation with some languages that are foreign to my daily routine but necessary to get my job done. I am not quite on board with you claim that Python is chosen for monetary benefits. To be a qualified programmer, there is so much more need to be learnt beyond Python. Python however, is a GREAT choice to overcome the initial fear of writing code in general, because it is more tolerant. My actual first language is C, and before my college I have never done programming before. I have to say, looking back, learning C as my first language without fully understanding the modern computer architecture is a horrible experience: so many questions as to why things is what it is now, so many traps, crazy pointers, cryptic errors, nightmare segmentfault. Programming is just very frustrating experience to me that the time. Of course, later on, it all makes sense, even pointer seems like a great idea(you can't have more freedom than that), just that we need to put great efforts regulating the use of it to prevent irregular behaviors. On the other hand, Python is a tolerant language, yet providing a pretty comprehensive sets of primitives to play and experiment with. Had I started with Python, I might not waste the initial year struggling and questioning myself whether I could program at all.

southerndrift 8y ago
Compared to C, Python is the better choice. However, it seems like you haven't learned a Lisp dialect. I would love to know if you would still prefer Python once you know Scheme.
- pfalcon 8y ago
  > I would love to know if you would still prefer Python once you know Scheme. I did. Actually, when I found Python (some 20 years ago), I thought - "Here's it - Lisp for real world".
- pmoriarty 8y ago
  I have to agree. Scheme is so much more elegant and so much simpler than Python. People often talk about how simple Python is, but many of them have either no experience with or no appreciation for Scheme. When they do have exposure to Scheme, it tends to be some ancient, primitive dialect like MIT Scheme rather than modern, full-featured scheme like Chicken, or Racket, or Guile -- so they look at Scheme as a toy language. I don't know how often I've heard comments along the lines of Scheme being a fine academic language but impractical for real work. Python does have a little nice lispyness to it, but it's deliberately limited by the language designers, the syntax is lacking and it has many frustrating inconsistencies and gotchas. Programming in Scheme is just so much easier.
- mtzet 8y ago
  I think both C, Python and Scheme are all perfectly fine choices for a first language. It really depends on what you want to do. Want to learn how a computer works? Learn C. Want to study abstract comp-sci concepts? Learn Scheme. Want to wire together libraries to get something running in the messy real world? Learn Python (or something similiar). A well-rounded CS education really ought to include all of these to at least some degree.
- innocentoldguy 8y ago
  Regarding C, my first language was C and I've always been thankful for that. It helped me understand low-level programming, memory management, pointers, registers, etc. It also helped me better understand how my computer's hardware works. Having C as my first language also gave me a greater appreciation for languages that handle all that complexity for me. Regarding Python vs. Scheme, I like both languages. I tend to prefer Python for certain types of programming, like NLP, machine learning, and math, just because the available libraries are so good. Having said that, I feel that the functional paradigm is superior to procedural programming and definitely (for me anyway) better than OOP, so for everything else I'd choose Scheme or some other functional language, like Elixir, Elm, Haskell, or Erlang, depending on my mood and what I'm doing.
- jcelerier 8y ago
  > Compared to C, Python is the better choice. However, it seems like you haven't learned a Lisp dialect. I would love to know if you would still prefer Python once you know Scheme. the school I went used to teach C, Python and Scheme in the first year (nowadays it's C, Python and Racket). I don't think I remember more than one or two people actually liking the LISP experience, how bad it was when comparing to other languages is actually a common joke subject amongst alumni.
  - kazinator 8y ago
    The language known as Scheme has done a lot of damage to Lisp's image. When undergrads are exposed to Scheme, they tend to forever carry a negative image of Lisp by association. A lot of the time when you meet someone who had a bad experience with Lisp, if you interview them a bit, you soon discover it was actually Scheme. Scheme twenty years ago, R5RS was even worse than now. It had nothing practical in the spec. No way to write a program consisting of multiple files. No error handling. R5RS talks about situations that trigger an "error", but nothing about how such a thing can be handled and recovered. Or how an error can be generated on purpose and then caught. Anyone who studied R5RS in school was learning an utter piece of academic garbage; a serious regression from real Lisp.
    - jcelerier 8y ago
      They tried many LISP dialects over the years: Scheme, CommonLisp and Racket - and I don't remember student reactions ever changing about it.
    - kbp 8y ago
      I agree that there's a problem of people (even the people who rave about how enlightening it is) misunderstanding that a toy Scheme interpreter is what Lisp is, but I don't think that's an issue with Scheme. Introductory FP classes that use Common Lisp don't leave any better a taste in students' mouths, and real world Scheme is a lot more capable than a toy implementation designed for pedagogical purposes. I don't think the standard's conservatism is very much a factor.
  - dimmwit 8y ago
- piyush_soni 8y ago
  I have working knowledge of C, C++, Scheme, and a little bit of Python, but I really don't think Scheme is true to all its hype. I'm not even sure if everyone praising it here is using it in real life projects or not or only academically. We do, and man, the tough life is with it. The only debugging we have here is numerous "format (print)" statements, it is terribly slow, and may be not everyone's using it as intended, but the way it promotes "lists" for everything is just plain wrong IMHO. End result, a lot of wrongful uses of searching in lists where a proper C/C++ data structure would prove much faster. Oh, and the deluge of useless parenthesis that it is, it hurts my eyes to read that code.
  - peatmoss 8y ago
    > deluge of useless parenthesis that it is, it hurts my eyes to read that code. Oh, how I wish I could share the joy I experience using Paredit with those parentheses. Paredit turns parentheses from an inconvenience into a turbo button for modifying code at an entirely new level of abstraction. When you started coding, you probably used an editor that worked on units that were single characters. Think Notepad. Then maybe you learned a programmers editor like Emacs, Vim, or Atom or Sublime. There you learned to cut, copy, fold, spindle, and mutilate code in lines or paragraphs. But Paredit... oh Paredit... now you have the tools to work with your code not in characters, lines, or paragraphs, but in code forms—the same stuff your code is made from. And the best part is that Paredit doesn’t have to have a deep knowledge of your code, groping imperfectly like Intellisense. Paredit is deterministic and easy to implement. If I could have an S-expression based version of every other language simply for paredit, I'd take it. Now a story for a different day is how much I hate typing commas in non-lisps.
  - bjoli 8y ago
    Which scheme are you using? Chez, chicken, guile and gambit all have pretty good debugging facilities, and a macro like chez's trace-lambda is a lot better than misusing print-debugging in most cases. Nobody ever said most list operations is anything else than o(n), and if you are using lists you are probably using the wrong data structure. Vectors or hash tables would probably be a better choice (which are provided by all serious schemes).
innocentoldguy 8y ago
> I am not quite on board with you [sic] claim that Python is chosen for monetary benefits. I can see it. I used to make a lot of money doing Python programming. About $40k a year more than I ever made doing C, Java, C# or C++. Of course, I did Python more recently, so there is the wage inflation between 1992 and today to consider. Still, you can make a lot writing Python code.
- gronne 8y ago
  ~70k today. Programming python in 92 - nice :)
  - innocentoldguy 8y ago
    @xte - I agree with you for the most part; however, I think there are some supply-and-demand considerations to be made. For example, companies who use esoteric or obsolete languages, where the workforce who knows that language inside and out is particularly small (a la Cobol programmers circa late 1990s), should expect to pay more. Where I live, because of the area being inundated with technology boot camps, there is an exorbitant number of JavaScript programmers. Since you can't breathe without huffing a JavaScript programmer, they tend to be paid less. Also, some languages and applications require a higher degree of knowledge, training, and expertise than others. For example, I would expect to pay a programmer working in robotics more than I'd expect to pay a React or Angular developer. Having grown up working in construction, I completely agree with your tool analogy though (and used the same analogy in another comment). @gronne - About three times that, but close. ;)
    - gronne 8y ago
      If you adjust only for inflation then its about 82% cumulative 1992-2018.
- xte 8y ago
  I find this affirmation, while perfectly legit and natural, a really sad indicator of today's state of IT: normally I expect a programmer to be payed because of it knowledge and time, used to solve problems. In that sense languages, libraries etc are simple tools so a metric like "$tool make me earn $amount of money" is a nonsense, something like a carpenter saying "drill make me more money than saw"... Of course, some tools maybe more effective than others, but I still find sad measure in money terms any of them...
innocentoldguy 8y ago
Congratulations on being a polyglot! In my opinion, all programmers should be polyglots, since some languages are better than others at various tasks. A programmer who only knows one language seems a lot like a carpenter who is only skilled with measuring tapes to me.
- grumdan 8y ago
  I would go further than that and say that it's also important for programmer to know different paradigms. Knowing C, Java, and Python is surely better than just knowing Java, but they're still quite similar. Ideally people would also learn some functional programming, even if they don't use it, and a Lisp dialect (to appreciate the value of good metaprogramming facilities and get over parenthesis-phobia).

southerndrift 8y ago

Compared to C, Python is the better choice. However, it seems like you haven't learned a Lisp dialect. I would love to know if you would still prefer Python once you know Scheme.

pfalcon 8y ago
> I would love to know if you would still prefer Python once you know Scheme. I did. Actually, when I found Python (some 20 years ago), I thought - "Here's it - Lisp for real world".
pmoriarty 8y ago
I have to agree. Scheme is so much more elegant and so much simpler than Python. People often talk about how simple Python is, but many of them have either no experience with or no appreciation for Scheme. When they do have exposure to Scheme, it tends to be some ancient, primitive dialect like MIT Scheme rather than modern, full-featured scheme like Chicken, or Racket, or Guile -- so they look at Scheme as a toy language. I don't know how often I've heard comments along the lines of Scheme being a fine academic language but impractical for real work. Python does have a little nice lispyness to it, but it's deliberately limited by the language designers, the syntax is lacking and it has many frustrating inconsistencies and gotchas. Programming in Scheme is just so much easier.
mtzet 8y ago
I think both C, Python and Scheme are all perfectly fine choices for a first language. It really depends on what you want to do. Want to learn how a computer works? Learn C. Want to study abstract comp-sci concepts? Learn Scheme. Want to wire together libraries to get something running in the messy real world? Learn Python (or something similiar). A well-rounded CS education really ought to include all of these to at least some degree.
innocentoldguy 8y ago
Regarding C, my first language was C and I've always been thankful for that. It helped me understand low-level programming, memory management, pointers, registers, etc. It also helped me better understand how my computer's hardware works. Having C as my first language also gave me a greater appreciation for languages that handle all that complexity for me. Regarding Python vs. Scheme, I like both languages. I tend to prefer Python for certain types of programming, like NLP, machine learning, and math, just because the available libraries are so good. Having said that, I feel that the functional paradigm is superior to procedural programming and definitely (for me anyway) better than OOP, so for everything else I'd choose Scheme or some other functional language, like Elixir, Elm, Haskell, or Erlang, depending on my mood and what I'm doing.
jcelerier 8y ago
> Compared to C, Python is the better choice. However, it seems like you haven't learned a Lisp dialect. I would love to know if you would still prefer Python once you know Scheme. the school I went used to teach C, Python and Scheme in the first year (nowadays it's C, Python and Racket). I don't think I remember more than one or two people actually liking the LISP experience, how bad it was when comparing to other languages is actually a common joke subject amongst alumni.
- kazinator 8y ago
  The language known as Scheme has done a lot of damage to Lisp's image. When undergrads are exposed to Scheme, they tend to forever carry a negative image of Lisp by association. A lot of the time when you meet someone who had a bad experience with Lisp, if you interview them a bit, you soon discover it was actually Scheme. Scheme twenty years ago, R5RS was even worse than now. It had nothing practical in the spec. No way to write a program consisting of multiple files. No error handling. R5RS talks about situations that trigger an "error", but nothing about how such a thing can be handled and recovered. Or how an error can be generated on purpose and then caught. Anyone who studied R5RS in school was learning an utter piece of academic garbage; a serious regression from real Lisp.
  - jcelerier 8y ago
    They tried many LISP dialects over the years: Scheme, CommonLisp and Racket - and I don't remember student reactions ever changing about it.
  - kbp 8y ago
    I agree that there's a problem of people (even the people who rave about how enlightening it is) misunderstanding that a toy Scheme interpreter is what Lisp is, but I don't think that's an issue with Scheme. Introductory FP classes that use Common Lisp don't leave any better a taste in students' mouths, and real world Scheme is a lot more capable than a toy implementation designed for pedagogical purposes. I don't think the standard's conservatism is very much a factor.
- dimmwit 8y ago
piyush_soni 8y ago
I have working knowledge of C, C++, Scheme, and a little bit of Python, but I really don't think Scheme is true to all its hype. I'm not even sure if everyone praising it here is using it in real life projects or not or only academically. We do, and man, the tough life is with it. The only debugging we have here is numerous "format (print)" statements, it is terribly slow, and may be not everyone's using it as intended, but the way it promotes "lists" for everything is just plain wrong IMHO. End result, a lot of wrongful uses of searching in lists where a proper C/C++ data structure would prove much faster. Oh, and the deluge of useless parenthesis that it is, it hurts my eyes to read that code.
- peatmoss 8y ago
  > deluge of useless parenthesis that it is, it hurts my eyes to read that code. Oh, how I wish I could share the joy I experience using Paredit with those parentheses. Paredit turns parentheses from an inconvenience into a turbo button for modifying code at an entirely new level of abstraction. When you started coding, you probably used an editor that worked on units that were single characters. Think Notepad. Then maybe you learned a programmers editor like Emacs, Vim, or Atom or Sublime. There you learned to cut, copy, fold, spindle, and mutilate code in lines or paragraphs. But Paredit... oh Paredit... now you have the tools to work with your code not in characters, lines, or paragraphs, but in code forms—the same stuff your code is made from. And the best part is that Paredit doesn’t have to have a deep knowledge of your code, groping imperfectly like Intellisense. Paredit is deterministic and easy to implement. If I could have an S-expression based version of every other language simply for paredit, I'd take it. Now a story for a different day is how much I hate typing commas in non-lisps.
- bjoli 8y ago
  Which scheme are you using? Chez, chicken, guile and gambit all have pretty good debugging facilities, and a macro like chez's trace-lambda is a lot better than misusing print-debugging in most cases. Nobody ever said most list operations is anything else than o(n), and if you are using lists you are probably using the wrong data structure. Vectors or hash tables would probably be a better choice (which are provided by all serious schemes).

innocentoldguy 8y ago

> I am not quite on board with you [sic] claim that Python is chosen for monetary benefits. I can see it. I used to make a lot of money doing Python programming. About $40k a year more than I ever made doing C, Java, C# or C++. Of course, I did Python more recently, so there is the wage inflation between 1992 and today to consider. Still, you can make a lot writing Python code.

gronne 8y ago
~70k today. Programming python in 92 - nice :)
- innocentoldguy 8y ago
  @xte - I agree with you for the most part; however, I think there are some supply-and-demand considerations to be made. For example, companies who use esoteric or obsolete languages, where the workforce who knows that language inside and out is particularly small (a la Cobol programmers circa late 1990s), should expect to pay more. Where I live, because of the area being inundated with technology boot camps, there is an exorbitant number of JavaScript programmers. Since you can't breathe without huffing a JavaScript programmer, they tend to be paid less. Also, some languages and applications require a higher degree of knowledge, training, and expertise than others. For example, I would expect to pay a programmer working in robotics more than I'd expect to pay a React or Angular developer. Having grown up working in construction, I completely agree with your tool analogy though (and used the same analogy in another comment). @gronne - About three times that, but close. ;)
  - gronne 8y ago
    If you adjust only for inflation then its about 82% cumulative 1992-2018.
xte 8y ago
I find this affirmation, while perfectly legit and natural, a really sad indicator of today's state of IT: normally I expect a programmer to be payed because of it knowledge and time, used to solve problems. In that sense languages, libraries etc are simple tools so a metric like "$tool make me earn $amount of money" is a nonsense, something like a carpenter saying "drill make me more money than saw"... Of course, some tools maybe more effective than others, but I still find sad measure in money terms any of them...

innocentoldguy 8y ago

Congratulations on being a polyglot! In my opinion, all programmers should be polyglots, since some languages are better than others at various tasks. A programmer who only knows one language seems a lot like a carpenter who is only skilled with measuring tapes to me.

grumdan 8y ago
I would go further than that and say that it's also important for programmer to know different paradigms. Knowing C, Java, and Python is surely better than just knowing Java, but they're still quite similar. Ideally people would also learn some functional programming, even if they don't use it, and a Lisp dialect (to appreciate the value of good metaprogramming facilities and get over parenthesis-phobia).