Question

Why are we learning Python language for this class instead of any other language?

Comments

As much as I know, Python’s code is readable and understandable even for developers who have never written it. Due to its ease of learning and usage, python codes can be easily written and executed much faster than other programming languages.

Answer 1

I suppose it is because Python is an amazing program for data analysis, artificial intelligence, web development and so on. Also since this is an introductory class to programming, Python is easier to learn compared to C, Java or so on.

Answer 2

I think its because Python is the stepping stone In the computer science world, like this language, is simple and very straight forward while other languages like C# or C++, are really advanced and takes really back knowledge of coding, so that's why we are choosing python as we have to learn basic first. :)

Answer 3

I generally agree with the points made by Feven and Dhananjay, but I'll go ahead add a bit more detail about the choice.

As a department, up until last year we used to teach Java in the introductory course. That was a good course, but Java isn't as useful for math/science and data analytics students. We chose Python in part to make the course serve multiple purposes: 1) helping teach the fundamentals of programming to computer science majors, and 2) also providing other majors with a useful coding skill that they could later apply to their own fields. We also wanted our students to become fluent programming in more than one language (not just Java, Java, Java all the time), and to be able to compare/contrast different programming languages.

I do think there's a good argument to be made that it's easier for beginners to get started with Python than with C/C++/Java. However, Python is also deep and complex language, so I think it's also true that mastering ALL of the Python language is just as difficult as mastering ALL of Java, or other languages. You will not learn all of the special features of Python in this course...but you will learn enough to do some nifty things, and you will learn about the features that are common to most programming languages, which will make it easier/faster to learn another language (like Java) next.

It's also possible to write very short programs in Python that still do powerful/interesting things. However, as programs get to be very large, languages like Java offer some more structure and support for developing big software projects. There are tradeoffs, and there is currently no "one language to rule them all"!