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Discussion on: Which concept took you the longest to grasp?

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dwd profile image
Dave Cridland

Python.

The advantage of Python is that it's quite a "broad church" language, supporting many different approaches to solving a problem - but it's also very consistent.

There are some things it won't teach you, most notably generics/templates (which are different, but similar, capabilities), but generally most concepts in other imperative languages exist in Python (and there are a few functional techniques about as well).

The lack of special-casing and "gotchas" makes it very simple to work with and explore, though, and things like Jupyter (a sort of web-based super-REPL) help things further.

Moving on from there, C++ is a great language to understand because it has both very low level elements to it and high level constructs built on top - allowing you do dig very deeply into how things like coroutines or containers actually work if you need to.

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Madza

I have no experience in using it, but as far as I've seen some code, I've liked the syntax of it πŸ˜‰ Very intuitive and easy to read for those starting out πŸ‘

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Dave Cridland

There used to be quite a number of languages designed for teaching - BASIC was one (designed by, amongst others, a nun), and Pascal was another. Universities and schools seem to have universally ditched them all in favour of Python.

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keogami

Sauce for the nun thing?

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dwd profile image
Dave Cridland

Sister Mary Kenneth Keller

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Took vows in 1940, and while doing a PhD - the first woman to get one in Comp Sci - ended up in Dartmouth College, implementing the first version of BASIC.

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Christopher Kruse

Wow, I didn't expect to find a Sr. Keller reference on DEV!

I went to Clarke, where she founded the Computer Science department (and there's a building named after here there now).

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keogami

Lol a nerdy nun, thanks for thr fact!