Nowadays, many novice students are learning Python as an entry-level programming language, and many colleges and universities are also learning. Why do many people in colleges and universities not like to use C as an introductory language for programming? Doesn't it mean that C can help beginners better grasp the underlying principles of computers?
So what are the advantages of using Python as a starter language and C as a starter language?
Why Python
Learning a programming language doesn't mean you'll be able to grasp and understand the underlying principles of computer hardware. In other words, a language is not necessarily related to understanding the underlying layer of the computer. For beginners, no matter what language you choose, it's actually more important for you to develop the ability to solve problems through programming. The faster a programming language can help you solve this problem, the more motivated you should probably be to learn it.
Wait until you can quickly solve some problems by learning a programming language, and then study the knowledge points related to computer principles behind the language through the problem itself, which may be one of the reasons why many foreign universities give up the introduction to the C language and choose the introduction to the Python language.
So what are the highlights of Python that can help many people get started quickly?
The code is neat
Compared to other codes, Python code has a relatively simple syntax, so it looks relatively concise. For example, if you want to output a Hello World in C or C++ or Java, you need to introduce a lot of standard input and output streams.
In Python code, you only need to output a Hello World in the following way.
print("hello world!") With such code simplicity, it is easier for beginners to learn the ability to solve problems through programming, rather than learning the cumbersome operations that come with the programming language itself.
High readability
Python code is very readable, and compared to other languages that require compilation, Python code is interpreted code, so it must be relatively easy to understand. For example, the following two pieces of code.
Python code
for num in range(10):
print(num) C language code
for(int i = 0;i<10;i++){
printf("%d\n",i);
} You'll find the two snippets of code above, and of course the other language code is similar to the C code. The two pieces of code actually do the same thing. In terms of the amount of code, the code is not simpler than the C code, but from the perspective of understanding, the code given by the Python language is easy for people to read, and it is very close to the language that humans can understand.
Another classic example of Python readability is pseudocode. I believe that many people have seen pseudocode, do you sometimes think that Python code is more like pseudocode?
A very rich standard library is provided
The third advantage of the Python language is that it offers a very rich set of standard libraries. This makes it very easy to implement many functions, and confirms what I said before, the language to get started is to choose a language that is easy to solve problems, and the Python language is even more suitable for this characteristic.
To put it simply, for example, you want to implement a list function in your program.
The Java code is as follows
List<String> strArray = new ArrayList();
strArray.add("hello");
strArray.add("world!"); Python code
lst = [1,2,3,4,5]
lst.append(7) You will see that the complexity of Java code is obviously higher than that of Python code. Of course, if you use C to implement it, it is even more complicated, because the C standard library does not support list operations. So it's very difficult to implement. Compared with Java, Python's support for lists is also very simple and easy to use.
For example, if you want to implement a file download function, it may be easy to implement it with the standard library that comes with Python, but for Java and C, you may need to use stream operations, network operations, and so on.
There is a strong interactivity
The Python language comes with a REPL (Read-Eval-Print-Loop), which means that it comes with an interactive shell. This is more advanced than other programming languages. In other words, with this REPL, you can get the result of running every line of your code immediately. This way, you can get quick feedback from the time you write the code to the time you see the results. For starters, this kind of quick feedback on the results of the code will help save a lot of time.
This is not the case with C or Java, where the code you write must be compiled before it can be translated into executable machine code. It may be said here that because Python is an interpreted language, and languages like C and Java are compiled, they need to be compiled before they can be executed.
In fact, this statement is just an artificial distinction for us, because in reality there is no such thing as compilation and interpretation, and what we think of as compilation and interpretation is only to distinguish the characteristics of the language. All programming languages are eventually compiled into machine code, so they all end up compiling. It's just that different forms of compilation have different interpreters.
For example, there are many implementations in the Python language, such as the CPython interpreter, which is based on the C language for Python interpretation. PyPy is a compiled implementation of the Python language for Python programs.
summary
These are the four key advantages of why Python is a good place to get started, and perhaps the more important advantage is the learner's interest in a certain language, or the programming language is better able to solve the problem you are encountering today. Because there is definitely a more suitable field for programming languages.