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Comment by xmprt | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Python should still be the go to language for teaching programming. It's pretty simple and reads like English but I feel like if you can get over a few syntax bumps, Go is a lot easier to understand and is much more straightforward compared to Python which has a lot of quirks (like why can't spaces/tabs be mixed if they look the same on the editor, why are there so many different ways to write a loop)...

The only thing that might trip up beginners in Go is error handling but if they haven't learned any other way of doing it before then they might just accept it for what it is.

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Go has a lot of quirks on things that matter far more. Like, arrays and slices, and how to use them as collections, is very much non-trivial compared to Python lists.

On the other hand, stuff like tabs vs spaces - when you would expect this to even come up? Whatever editor they'd use to start coding with, it'll be configured to use one or the other. In fact, these days, unless you get something exotic, it'll be spaces for sure.

And Python has exactly two ways to write a loop: one for conditional looping, and another when you want to iterate over a collection or a range. Is that really too many?

With tabs vs spaces stuff, the problem is that it's not exactly something that you can teach (like you said the editor will handle it for you). Then later if a beginner tries doing something on their own and runs into that error, it's not exactly intuitive how to fix it and they run into a brick wall that can't be solved no matter how much they look at their code.

Maybe as introduction, sure. But IMO Python does not encourage exploratory reasoning about how programs work.

For example, the question "how does `x.y()` get evaluated?" has a very complex answer. `x += y` is even more complex.

What languages would you recommend for exploratory reasoning?

C++11 is probably as close as you can get to something that's simple enough and widely used but also supports diving into how computers work because you will eventually have to manage your own memory (although I'm not sure if memory management is an important skill for someone just starting to learn how to code).

For a real deep understanding, you'd probably have to jump into the actual computer microchip architecture to learn how computers store memory and do things like pipelining, branch prediction, and caching. Then a primer on Operating Systems (I like "Three Easy Pieces") should fill in the gaps.

I would choose Asm or perhaps even raw machine code.

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