Experiences/guidance on teaching Python as a first programming language

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 17 Dec 2013 09:54:41 -0500, Roy Smith wrote:

> In article <mailman.4286.1387291924.18130.python-list at python.org>,
>  Neil Cerutti <neilc at norwich.edu> wrote:
> 
>> On 2013-12-17, Steven D'Aprano
>> <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
>> > I would really like to see good quality statistics about bugs per
>> > program written in different languages. I expect that, for all we
>> > like to make fun of COBOL, it probably has few bugs per
>> > unit-of-useful-work-done than the equivalent written in C.
> 
> Well, there was that little Y2K thing...

Oh come on, how were people in the 1990s supposed to predict that they 
would be followed by the year 2000???

That's a good point, but that wasn't a language issue, it was a program 
design issue. Back in the 70s and 80s, when saving two digits per date 
field seemed to be a sensible thing to do, people simply didn't imagine 
that their programs would still be used in the year 1999[1]. That's not 
the same sort of bug as (say) C buffer overflows, or SQL code injection 
attacks. It's not like the COBOL language defined dates as having only 
two digits.




[1] What gets me is that even in the year 1999, there were still 
programmers writing code that assumed two-digit years. I have it on good 
authority from somebody working as an external consultant for a bank in 
1999 that he spent most of 1998 and 1999 fixing *brand new code* written 
by the bank's own staff. You'd think that having lived through that 
experience would have shaken his belief that private enterprise does 
everything better, and the bigger the corporation the better they do it, 
but apparently not. Go figure.


-- 
Steven