No, that I would get bashed reeally bad.

He is, however, like normal, entirely right with his refutes. That copy-pasta with Java claims was rather flawed, and Kllr hilariously pointed out with each bullet.

Heh, saw this 3 page long argument (mud-throwing) and thought it was interesting. Indeed, Python is very much OOP, but it also offers an option for function based programming, hence its popularity.

Anyway, enough mud-throwing - let's get this thread back on track.
If you are sticking with Python, the official Python tutorial is a good start:
http://docs.python.org/tutorial/

(The first two chapters don't really teach much about the language - more or less how to get scripts set up. The following chapters do.)

Once you've gotten used to the language, start having fun with it!
PyGame, like its name implies, is used quite a bit for creating games with Python.
http://pygame.org/

wxPython is another library (module?) you can install. Its base is wxWidgets, which is a cross-platform GUI library. Also something fun to play with:
http://www.wxpython.org/

Finally, when you finish a small little project (say, a timer or a small game), you'd probably want to package it up and make it portable. PyInstaller is for you - it packages your program so that anyone, with or without Python, can run your program.
http://www.pyinstaller.org/

EDIT: Just in case - to clarify, wxPython is a cross-platform GUI library that uses wxWidgets as its core (obviously). Note that wxPython (at least for Windows) already includes the wxWidgets core, so don't download the wxWidgets library unless you wish to program C++.

XCode user, and proud.


I've used VS + VS Express for C++. The code completion is definitely good, but the user interface (like all things microsoft) is completely schizophrenic and I haven't yet found a scenario where the C/C++ debugging beats out XCode (at least 3.x and up), and certainly nothing that can come close to DTrace/Instruments for instrumented debugging. Also a lot of the project management features are completely retarded. Off the top of my head:

• No SCM integration by default
  
• Adding custom build rules is stupidly inflexible
  
• setting build-order dependencies + sub-targets within a project is out of the question.
  

When (/what version) did you last use XCode's debugging tools? I've been using XCode (free) + VS Express (also free) side by side for 3 years now, so I'm pretty sure my irritation with VS isn't just based on learning curve.


I actually laughed out loud.


Notepad++ is a pretty good programmer's text editor, but it is not an IDE.

The undergraduate CS students who are forced to learn Java in some introductory CS101/CS102 course are indeed those most likely to have no idea how to code at all; as an instructor and as a peer to computer science and engineering students, I'm horrified at how little code or programming skill some of them have at all, let alone a "strong understanding" of the power and limitations of an OOP language.

yeah, I just write and compile manually, this is probably because the first C# book I read started me out with notepad and the csc.exe compiler....

I'm very glad I learned programming *before* I take 10th grade AP Comp Sci (Java of course :/ ) because I talked to juniors/seniors who took it before about simple programming concepts, and they didn't seem to understand what exactly an Object was, what inheritance was (they thought it has something to do like morphing two instances together to make a new one with an undefined type), what the purpose of static typing was, etc. -- Apparently the class dent even go much into Object Oriented programming, just a lot of algorithms (that most of them forgot) and they learned what recursion was so they thought they were sooo smart because of that (and then they couldn't show more uses for it rather than just the vanilla factorial function).

It was *really* **really** ~~~REALLLY~~~ sad.

So, who said that java people will be great programmers in universities, seana? I'm totally with Kerm on this. These were just a sample of the class (the top students went on to be rather masterful Java programmers) but these people I "debated" with were in the middle of the class and got a 4/5 on their AP exam. (and hence got college credit)

Unfortunately the AP Board discontinued the AB variant of the examination (what I took in tenth grade) because not enough people were prepared to take it, but I remember it as being very rigorous in making sure you understood OOP + inheritance. Though come to think of it, I have no idea what the AP Comp. Sci. A *does* cover, because I'm pretty sure the intro to algorithms + complexity section was also AB only. As someone who has taken it more recently, can you shed some light on the issue?