cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19849935
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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It's also important to note that you might come out ahead in learning those abstract concepts using a harder language.
But my first language was Pascal. from a book stolen from my dad's library. Then C++. I still wouldn't call myself anything other than an amateur.... I mean, my dad can do more with one line of C than most programmers can do in their entire career. (he really shouldn't. but he does. Calls it "job security".)
I was hacking scripts and web shit together in perl, python and php for many years before learning C, and just a couple months learning C/C++ made me understand so many more basic concepts than all previous years experiences combined.
Try assembly then - it'll freaking blow your mind!:-)
I took a compiler course focused on optimization and porting. So I worked with x86 and ARM. There's very little reason in modern computing to write assembly by hand, but it's still useful to be able to read and understand.
Having to work within such constraints, it really showed me difficulties that modern languages try to entirely abstract away from you. e.g. there are only so many "registers" that physically exist, before you have to start using much slower to access memory locations - a very far cry indeed from automated variable garbage collection!!
I agree that you will learn more abstract concepts with more low level languages, but they are often not necessary. See Scala, beautiful language, lot's of fancy subtle computer science concepts, and a plummeting popularity since its main popularizer, Apache Spark, implemented a Python API.
Well. yes. it does strongly depend on what you intend to do with it.
Python is a great language that's very broadly used; there's a reason that Apache added the python API; after all. (and why Scala is plummeting.) I wouldn't even say Pascal was all that useful, to me. I think I 'learned it' enough to get through the dumb book, and then went on to something else. C++ was more fun anyhow.