From: 7stud -- <bbxx789_05ss@...>
Date: 2008-05-30T05:58:00+09:00
Subject: Re: Should I Learn Ruby as a First Language?

7stud -- wrote:
>
> Based on all of the above, I recommend Python over Ruby.   Good luck.
>

I just wanted to add that I started with C++ and Java.  Unless you plan 
on becoming a computer science student in college, I would not start 
with C or C++.  It takes a lot of time to learn the language and if you 
want to do much more than grind out calculations, it requires complex 
programs.

On the other hand, python has a broad application and it allows you to 
perform many tasks very easily.  For instance, in C++ to get the 
contents of a web page and then print out some information contained 
therein, you would have to be pretty good with C++, and then you would 
have to learn a topic called sockets, which is quite difficult.  In the 
end, your program would probably be 100+ lines of code and very error 
prone.

In python, you can write that same program in less than 20 lines of 
code.  The reason it's so easy in python is that expert programmers have 
done that programming task many times in the past, and their code is 
contained in the python libraries.  All you have to do is call a few 
simple functions to get the benefit of all their hard work and 
experience.  In C++, there are no equivalent libraries, so every 
programmer who wants to get the contents of a web page and print out 
some information contained therein has to reinvent the wheel and write 
their own program from scratch.

python has a vast number of libraries that cover almost every subject 
you can think of, and the code in the libraries was written by expert 
programmers.  In python, you get access to their programs by calling a 
few comparatively simple functions.  As a result, complex programming 
tasks are reduced to a few lines of code.

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