Re:Why Learn to Program in C?
by na85 on Monday February 01, 2016 @07:04PM
(#11016711)
For students who are just learning to wrestle with the programming concept, python is far superior because it lets the student focus more on what to express and when, and less on remembering silly things like curly braces and semicolons.
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First, braces and semicolons are not silly. They are just a different form of syntax than indentation. (And I say that as a Pythonista of many years, who also learned and then used C a lot before learning Python.)
Second, your point may (or not) be correct, but it is at best tangentially related to the point I was replying to, or to mine.
I don't think it's tangentially related at all. The cognitive load of trying to program for the first time is quite high.
If the student doesn't have to focus on remembering whether or not you need a semicolon or a colon on switch statement cases, they can focus more on actually grokking the process of translating thoughts and algorithms to code.