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Comment by Jensson | Hacker News Reader

And most educators decided on Python because? You don't think it has anything to do with people liking the language and therefore wanting to use it and teach in it?

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> And most educators decided on Python because?

Because there was a huge push by the Python designers towards this direction?

They got funds from the DARPA in 1999 for a proposal entitled "Computer Programming for Everybody", the first part of which was " Develop a new computing curriculum suitable for high school and college students".

The Python project did a lot of outreach and marketing specifically targeted at educators to explain why Python was a great teaching language (and did a lot of work to make it so - don't get me wrong). It worked.

It can also be due to tooling -- once a student has got the python binary installed you can get them writing and running code without having to make sure they have the correct version of x, y, z (don't even need conda or pip) or teaching them what a compiler is etc.

Javascript is quite popular as an introductory language too -- students can open up a web browser and type stuff in the console in the middle of a lecture.

I agree. It even features a basic IDE, IDLE, as part of the default install. No need to figure out how to configure your text editor to interact with the Python shell. I remember trying to learn Ruby before Python, several years ago, but then got stuck trying to configure Geany to work with Ruby.

They chose Python since it's essentially a free, open-source alternative to Matlab.

Also, Python is used as a scripting language on top of C, and C is popular.

Why didn't they use Scheme? That was pushed by a very prestigious institution so had some momentum in the education field. Instead they switched to Python and basically nobody uses Scheme to teach any longer. Python won because people preferred it over lisp, simple as that.

Teaching Scheme etc always got pushback from the outside, because regardless of how well it works for education, people get it in their head that you are teaching something that "industry doesn't use" and thus is bad.

in comparatively few places Matlab would have been the alternative.

>They chose Python since it's essentially a free, open-source alternative to Matlab.

Different domains of education had different reasons but some classes had nothing to do with Matlab.

- The professor Gerry Sussman of the famous MIT 6.001 SICP class said they switched from Scheme to Python because (paraphrasing) it's more high-level with libraries to get immediate work done. (E.g. A class project to control a robot.)

- Peter Norvig teaching Artificial Intelligence classes switched from Lisp to Python because he noticed his students kept getting stuck on Lisp syntax instead of progressing on the more important AI concepts. Switching to Python made teaching the class easier.

One can google for their interviews on why they switched to Python.

It's a really intuitive one for new people to learn - you're far from the machine, but the syntax doesn't get in the way of the concepts much. Of all the languages I have taught people in, Python is the quickest route to understanding/independence.

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