What is different with Python ?

[Andrea Griffini]

On Sat, 11 Jun 2005 21:52:57 -0400, Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com>
wrote:

>I think new CS students have more than enough to learn with their 
>*first* language without having to discover the trials and tribulations 
>of memory management (or those other things that Python hides so well).

I'm not sure that postponing learning what memory
is, what a pointer is and others "bare metal"
problems is a good idea. Those concept are not
"more complex" at all, they're just more *concrete*
than the abstract concept of "variable".
Human mind work best moving from the concrete to
the abstract, we first learn counting, and only
later we learn rings (or even set theory).
Unless you think a programmer may live happy
without understanding concrete issues then IMO
the best is to learn concrete facts first, and
only later abstractions.
I think that for a programmer skipping the
understanding of the implementation is just
impossible: if you don't understand how a
computer works you're going to write pretty
silly programs. Note that I'm not saying that
one should understand every possible implementation
down to the bit (that's of course nonsense), but
there should be no room for "magic" in a computer
for a professional programmer.

Also concrete->abstract shows a clear path; starting
in the middle and looking both up (to higher
abstractions) and down (to the implementation
details) is IMO much more confusing.

Andrea