This article from the Economist may interest parents wondering what programming language their children should learn. My 11-year-old daughter has been doing the MIT edX class
Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python. I have helped her a bit.
Python has brought computer programming to a vast new audienceJuly 19, 2018
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The language’s popularity has grown not merely among professional developers—nearly 40% of whom use it, with a further 25% wishing to do so, according to Stack Overflow, a programming forum—but also with ordinary folk. Codecademy, a website that has taught 45m novices how to use various languages, says that by far the biggest increase in demand is from those wishing to learn Python. It is thus bringing coding to the fingertips of those once baffled by the subject. Pythonistas, as aficionados are known, have helped by adding more than 145,000 packages to the Cheese Shop, covering everything from astronomy to game development.
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Python is not perfect. Other languages have more processing efficiency and specialised capabilities. C and C++ are “lower-level” options which give the user more control over what is happening within a computer’s processor. Java is popular for building large, complex applications. JavaScript is the language of choice for applications accessed via a web browser. Countless others have evolved for various purposes. But Python’s killer features—simple syntax that makes its code easy to learn and share, and its huge array of third-party packages—make it a good general-purpose language. Its versatility is shown by its range of users and uses. The Central Intelligence Agency has employed it for hacking, Pixar for producing films, Google for crawling web pages and Spotify for recommending songs.
Some of the most alluring packages that Pythonistas can find in the Cheese Shop harness artificial intelligence (AI). Users can create neural networks, which mimic the connections in a brain, to pick out patterns in large quantities of data. Mr Van Rossum says that Python has become the language of choice for AI researchers, who have produced numerous packages for it.
Not all Pythonistas are so ambitious, though. Zach Sims, Codecademy’s boss, believes many visitors to his website are attempting to acquire skills that could help them in what are conventionally seen as “non-technical” jobs. Marketers, for instance, can use the language to build statistical models that measure the effectiveness of campaigns. College lecturers can check whether they are distributing grades properly. (Even journalists on The Economist, scraping the web for data, generally use programs written in Python to do so.)
