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by biaxident 5350 days ago
Actually research has shown that it does make a difference: [Why complicate things?: introducing programming in high school using Python](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1151880)

They found that students who were taught Python instead of Java scored higher on their tests. Languages like Python and Ruby make it far easier for people to jump straight into the code. If I'm learning about linked lists why do I need this main method? Ruby and Python have lots of abstractions which make it easier for someone learning to be able to focus on the problem at hand.

1 comments

Indeed.

As someone taking a data structures course in post-secondary school where the facilitation language is Java, I've struggled more with the Java development environment than I have with actually understanding the data structures and the implementations. Even the Java specific implementations are simple once you can get your package and classes playing nice and compiled to bytecode.

This is not a slam on Java, just an observation from personal experience that some interpreted languages like Ruby and Python tend to make it easier to do casual programming exercises or tasks than those needing any compiling prior to execution, such as C, C++, and Java.