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Help me out. I love the idea of Python as a first language. But do you think there's an issue teaching a whitespace-sensitive language as a first language? When
by bphogan 12y ago
Help me out. I love the idea of Python as a first language. But do you think there's an issue teaching a whitespace-sensitive language as a first language? When students eventually move to Java/JavaScript/C#/Swift/whatever, will this be more difficult?
- dragonwriter 12y ago> But do you think there's an issue teaching a whitespace-sensitive language as a first language? No. Most languages are whitespace sensitive, though what whitespace differences matter varies from language to language. > When students eventually move to Java/JavaScript/C#/Swift/whatever, will this be more difficult? I doubt it. If anything, the indentation discipline they've learned will make their code in those languages more readable.
- recursive 12y agoIf you indent your code consistently, you'd never notice that python had syntactically significant whitespace. So the only reason it would ever cause you a problem was if your indentation was wrong. In many languages, programmers specify blocks using both braces and indentation. Python merely loses the redundancy.