What I find interesting is that is we move slightly beyond BASIC, we get to a somewhat middle ground, where things like Python live. The question then becomes, at what point in the learning cycle do Python's choices in accessibility become liabilities, if ever? Does optimizing your code for legibility of novices end up hurting you at some point? What about if society shifts, and the majority of people have some programming experience? What if the journeyman of today is tomorrow's novice? Does Python end up being tomorrow's BASIC?

This is of course focusing on specific aspects of Python, and not Python as a whole, which I think is a very capable language (if not my cup of tea).

> The question then becomes, at what point in the learning cycle do Python's choices in accessibility become liabilities, if ever?

Fairly quickly, in my experience. Muddled data types, all kinds of conversion rules and non-obvious trickery required to get the job done.

Ok, you do get the job done but it almost never feels clean.

I'm not convinced of this. See my talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIItfQJEVdM

That's because likely for you starting out on power tools would have worked. But as modest as you are in this thread you are - to me at least - clearly extremely gifted and what works for you may not work for us mortals.

Or maybe you only appear to be extremely gifted because of the tools that you use but that's a hard one to prove without a large and preferably controlled experiment.

:-) Thanks, but see my talk above. I'm slowly attempting to build just such controlled experiments. My first exploratory study on such is discussed in the above talk.

It's 6 am here and I'm still awake, I will watch your talk when I have done some sleeping and the days work. Thanks for the link. And thank you for all your work, super interesting stuff this.