Some good reasons for learning python
President Obama thinks required programming language learning in high school is a great idea. So do I, and I think we should all start with python. Writing code with it is very fast. When software engineers tell you “I can do it in 10 minutes”, in C/C++ they mean 4h, in java they mean 2h and in python they mean it. You can really do anything. I’ve done some serial communication, bit level manipulation, network level event-based servers, multithreading, webservice providing and consuming, SQL and cassandra client faster than what I’ve been doing in any other language. It’s easy to learn. You can start your first program right now and be good at it in 2 weeks. It comes “batteries included”. You don’t have to install third-party libraries. Contrary to ruby, you don’t have to choose between the thousands of gems available, there’s almost always one official way to do things. Which leads to the next point: It’s simple to read someone else’s code. This is because it’s high level language and you quickly know all the librairies. It now has some IDEs. I know some people like to code in vi, but this is ugly and unproductive. Pydev is simple to install and supports a pretty good (or not so bad) auto-completion. This leads me to two opposing ideas (but you’ll understand where I stand): ...