Couper, Tim T wrote:
... My experience is that developers who know C and C++ can be productive
in less than 1 week in python, and find it liberating, and educational, to
do so. And at the same time they will have added a second language to
their toolbox. As Kurt points out, learning C/C++ takes considerably
longer (weeks/months to attain a level of competence).
Yup. Remember that "be productive" is not quite the same as "master."
The nice thing is that the mastery comes on a gentle slope, adding to
your productivity without requiring drastic rethinking of all you
understood (as is done to physics students, for example).
Python is now used in a number of universities as the language in which
to teach comp sci undergraduate courses (I know of Leeds, & MIT),
biomathematics, and my daughter just finished her PhD in speech and
language processing at Edinburgh .. using python and Matplotlib .. as
the extensive C/C++ libraries in that infomatics world are wrapped in
python - and the MSc Comp Sci course has replaced Java as the language
for teaching with Python.
As a data point, Georgia Tech (I believe) had a two-semester Computer
Science intro course in C++. In introducing a Python intro course, they
provided for a few years both the Python and the C++ first semester,
and kept the C++ second semester. They found no measurable difference
in the performance on the second course (still in C++) even though the
Python course people had to learn a new language in addition to learning
the rest of the coursework. The first course is now in Python, since
at the end of the two-semester sequence they know two languages and
apparently suffer no compensating loss.
--Scott David Daniels
scott.dani...@acm.org
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