New to programming

[Laura Creighton]

>Without starting an advocacy thread, why is Python so well spoken of as a
>first language?

As you learn to program you develop habits.  You want to develop good
habits and not bad ones.  But `that the code runs' is not enough in
most languages -- it can produce the correct result, now, and still be
a bad way to do things.  However, as a novice you do not know anything
about good and bad habits.  And getting your code to run is very good
for the ego.  You feel competant, and powerful, and skillful, and all
these _terrific_ things.  So, unless you are very careful, (which as a
novice you aren't competant enough to be), you will feel good as you
do bad.  The more you program, the more you get bad habits, until you
finally know enough to hate your bad habits and then work hard at
overcoming them.  This is hard, both on the ego, and hard because
changing a habit is hard.  Many people never change.  They are bad
programmers forever.

Python doesn't let you do a great many things that we know are bad.  So
if you are feeling terrific because you are programming bigger and
harder things in python, and the code works, you are more likely to
be feeling good because you are doing good, not because you are doing
bad.

Laura Creighton