Comments on: A programmer’s first language is?

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:28:19 +0000

I second the vote for Scheme. As a bonus, the book ‘The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs’ is available on-line: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
Once you get used to passing around functions as first-class variables any other programming language becomes easy

By: Chuck Esterbrook

Chuck Esterbrook — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 03:15:47 +0000

Another option is Cobra which combines the syntax of Python with features found in Java, C#, Objective-C and Eiffel. It has stronger error checking than Python among other advantages. See the “Comparison to Python” document on the site. Disclosure: I’m the author of Cobra (and long time Python user).

By: Spike

Spike — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:43:48 +0000

Ok, you got me. Too lazy to actually install a Java interpreter

Sharma, Carl, & Adam: You’re right, there are easier ways involving the special features of Python (and presumably the same is true for Java code), but I want to get at the difference in the style of the syntax, and it’s hard to do that with just one line. I think the best way to make that comparison is to look at code which does the same thing in roughly the same way. Got any better examples which show this stylistic difference?

By: tgdavies

tgdavies — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:01:44 +0000

Your Java doesn’t compile. Try:

String phrase = “I am Jack’s Colon.”;
int count = 0;
for (Character c : phrase.toCharArray()) {
if (c == ‘a’) {
++count;
}
}
System.out.println(count);

By: Adam

Adam — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:49:55 +0000

or… len(filter(lambda x: x==’a', phrase))

By: Christoph Hack

Christoph Hack — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:40:04 +0000

and here is an example with strings:
>>> ‘foobar’ is ‘FOOBAR’.lower()
False
>>> ‘foobar’ == ‘FOOBAR’.lower()
True

So, please use the right operators

By: Christoph Hack

Christoph Hack — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:36:45 +0000

But there are also things you should care about in python too, even in those short programs. The identity operator “is”, isn’t right in this example, you should use “==”, which checks for equality. Otherwise you could get some bugs, which aren’t easy to locate… (e.g. 10000 is 9999+1 vs. 10000 == 9999+1)

By: Carl

Carl — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:45:52 +0000

Also on Reddit, someone pointed out that reinventing the wheel is dumb: "I am Jack's Colon.".count("a")

By: Sharma

Sharma — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:56:58 +0000

Hey, I came here from Reddit; and one commenter pointed outdo that there’s a slightly more idiomatic way of doing that in Python:

print sum(letter is “a” for letter in “I am Jack’s Colon.”)

Python is easy, but it’s the idioms that really make the language look good.

By: Oolis

Oolis — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 05:13:14 +0000

Scheme