The Next Big Language

[Andrej Mitrovic]

On 10/19/10, bearophile <bearophileHUGS at lycos.com> wrote:
> Andrej Mitrovic:
>
>> Knowing the syntax and knowing how to use a language are two very
>> different things. If you're a newbie you can learn the C syntax in a
>> couple of weeks, but you would be very wrong to assume that you know
>> e.g. "70%" of C, and that you could read any C project and understand
>> it well.
>
> The point I was trying to express is that from what I have seen people are
> able to learn to program Python (this means quite more than just the syntax)
> in *much* less time it takes to learn C++/D. And this has precise causes.
>

It took me only a few days to read the Dive Into Python tutorial + the
Python tutorial on the website, the syntax is very easy to learn.
After that, I quickly got into using Python with QT, and it was damn
simple to start making some functional GUI-enabled apps. So, I agree,
Python is *much* easier to learn than C++. Although it would probably
take a few years before I would know many of the Python idioms and
write really "Pythonic" code.

I don't know about Python vs D. Coming from C/Python and having some
basic knowledge of C++ it wasn't that hard to get adjusted to D at
all. That being said, there really aren't any beginner books/tutorials
that I know of that target D2 yet (maybe one of those published
Japanese/Turkish ones do target newbies..?). TDPL is certainly not a
book for someone completely new to programming.

I have to say though, the Python documentation is just *fantastic*
(although I've heard some people disagree). It covers just about
everything you need to know (batteries included!), and there's always
instructions on how to use the library and the interpreter itself.
You're rarely left alone with a definition of some function without an
example or two + a thorough explanation on how the example works. I
really wish we had this for D2.