Discussion on: What is the simplest code to explain a loop?

[Yaser Al-Najjar]

Yep we love teaching Python cuz it's the best language IMHO to teach... simple expressive syntax.

Javascript is also good to start with, but there are tons of crap from the old standard like var and for in, just to "not break old programs" :|

[John Alcher]

Yep we love teaching Python cuz it's the best language IMHO to teach... simple expressive syntax.

I share the same sentiments! I offer tutorials to my fellow CS students and Python is my go-to language for explaining basic programming constructs.

Ideally though, a student should be well-versed on at least one scripting language (Python, PHP, JS, etc.) and a compiled one (Java, C++, C#, etc.) since some concepts are harder to visualize on certain languages. Like, functional programming is better taught in JS than C++ and pointers are better taught in C than PHP.

[Yaser Al-Najjar]

Totally agree with you, each lang serves better in explaining some concepts.

A bit regretting that my first lang was C cuz I spent lots of time understanding pointers and arrays instead of going into actual domains problems :D

Same goes to Python, I see many people explaining data structures in Python while in the very beginning they don't solve an actual problem cuz Python has lists already! That's why C is the way to go IMO for data structures.

[Slavius]

In for loops you can empoy this little trick to emphasize decrementing from max to 0:

int max = 10;
for (i = max; i --> 0;) {
  printf(".");
}

It is just pretty-formatted i-- > 0
What it does it decrements i and makes sure it's > 0 in the comparison part of the for leaving out the increment/decrement part.
Works the opposite way (end to start) so it's not suitable for processing lists where ascending order matters.

[John Alcher]

That's a neat trick! But it looks something more of a trick to get the shortest solution to a programming quiz rather than a practical solution, IMO.

[Slavius]

Let's call it a syntactic sugar. It makes the code shorter, more visual while still keeping the same functionality; but may make someone puzzled about what it does on first sight as it's not common.