What killed Smalltalk could kill Python

[sohcahtoa82 at gmail.com]

On Wednesday, January 21, 2015 at 4:10:08 PM UTC-8, Mario Figueiredo wrote:
> In article <mailman.17933.1421884677.18130.python-list at python.org>, 
> rosuav at gmail.com says...
> > 
> > Bad idea. Better to pick a language that makes it easy to get things
> > right, and then work on the fun side with third-party libraries, than
> > to tempt people in with "hey look how easy it is to do X" and then
> > have them stuck with an inferior or flawed language. Too many people
> > already don't know the difference between UTF-16 and Unicode. Please,
> > educators, don't make it worse.
> > 
> > ChrisA
> 
> 
> Indeed. If games and funnies is what drive beginners into programming, 
> that's fine. But the educational principles of programming shouldn't be 
> trashed in the process. We need serious developers in today's complex 
> application systems. Not uneducated programmers with nary a knowledge of 
> Software Engineering. Besides if games and funnies are the only thing 
> that can drive someone into programming, I'd rather not see that person 
> become a developer.
> 
> "I want to become a programmer so I can make games" is, on the vast 
> majority of cases, the quote of someone who will never become a 
> programmer. Why should teachers reward that kind of thought?

I think one of the problems is that most of the people with the "I want to become a programmer so I can make games" mentality really have no clue at all how much work it takes to produce a game.  They just see that Minecraft was made started by just one guy and now he's a billionaire, and they think "I want that to happen to me!".  They think that just because the game has low-resolution graphics means they could produce something similar in just a couple days, ignoring complexities like rendering optimizations and interaction with the world.

Others will pick up Python because everyone tells them its an easy language to learn and then think they're going to make the next Call of Duty or World of Warcraft with it without any knowledge of basic algorithms.  They might learn a few from some tutorials, but they'll have no idea how to apply them.  They won't be able to make the jump from "Here's how to start a TCP server in one window while connecting to it from a client in another window and send chat messages back and forth" (essentially a basic implementation of netcat) to creating a game server that sends game state updates to the players.