Honestly, I'm still incredibly shocked at just how bad Python is on this front.

I'm plenty familiar with packaging solutions that are painful to work with, but the state of python was shocking when I hopped back in because of the available ML tooling.

UV seems to be at least somewhat better, but damn - watching pip literally download 20+ 800MB torch wheels over and over trying to resolve deps only to waste 25GB of bandwidth and finally completely fail after taking nearly an hour was absolutely staggering.

As someone who spent nearly a decade with Python, I'd say 90% of people will answer "yes", so I'd like to offer a different perspective.

IMHO if you want to pick it up for a couple toy projects just to get a feel of what coding is like, then by all means try it out. But eventually you'll benefit tremendously from exploring other languages.

Python will teach you a lot of bad habits. You will feel like you know what you're doing, but only because you don't know all of the ways in which it is handwaving a lot of complexity that is inherent to writing code which you should be very much aware of.

Knowing what I know now, I wish Rust existed when I started out so that it could have been my first language. I'm never giving up the borrow checker and the type system that come with it.

But you don't have to do Rust. It's fine to work on a couple of projects in Python, then maybe something small in C (though the tooling can feel arcane and frustrating), then maybe switch it up and go with some more functional programming (FP) flavored like Lisp or F#.

I know Rust has a lot of zealots and a lot of haters, but I'm not pushing an agenda. I just think it strikes that perfect balance between being extremely expressive, clear to read (after maybe a month of writing it daily), strong type system, lots of FP elements, no OOP clutter but super powerful traits, the borrow checker which you'll invariably learn to love, and more...

This will give you a strong foundation upon which you'll be able to continuously build knowledge. And even if you start with Rust, you should definitely explore Python, C, Lisp and F# later (or maybe Haskell instead of F#)

Yeah, definitely. It's basically executable pseudocode and it's really simple for a beginner to pick up and hit the ground running for a variety of use cases.

Some people will tell you to start with C or C++ to get a better intuition for what's actually happening under the hood in Python, but that's not really necessary for most use cases unless you're doing something niche. Some of the most popular use cases for Python are webapps, data analysis, or general automation. For the 1% of use cases that Python isn't the right fit for, you can still use it to prototype or glue things together.

There are a lot of great resources out there for learning Python, but they won't necessarily teach you how to make great software. You can't go wrong with the official tutorial. https://learn.scientific-python.org/development/ is pretty terse and incorporates a lot of best practices.

I go back and forth on this. A lot of people make good points.

In the end, my final answer is - yes. I say that because I believe it's the easiest programming language to get something working in. And getting something working is what motivates people to keep going.

If you sit them down and say 'well before you learn python you need to learn how a computer really works, here's an ASM x86 book', they're gonna probably read 10 pages, say this is boring, then go do something else. I think that because I went through that as a kid - I started reading a C++ book with no knowledge and gave up. It wasn't until I found qbasic and VB, by all marks a terrible language, that I really got motivated to learn and keep going because progress was so easy.

Python will teach you the basics - control flow, loops, variables, functions, libraries, etc. Those apply to almost every language. Then when you move to a different language, you at least know the basics and can focus on what's different or added that you didn't have or know before.

Not the person you replied to but I'd say definitely not. It'd be easy to pick up bad habits from python (untyped variables) and try to carry them over to other languages. It's also the king of runtime errors, which will frustrate newbies.

I think a compiled language is a better choice for people just getting started. Java is good, IMO, because it is verbose. Eventually the beginner may get tired of the verbosity and move on to something else, but at least they'll understand the value of explicit types and compile-time errors.

I would personally recommend Javascript/Typescript over Python, but Python is a reasonable option. Especially now that we have uv so you don't have to crawl through the bush of thorns that Python's terrible tooling (pip, venv etc) surrounds you with.

I would just encourage you to move on from Python fairly quickly. It's like... a balance bike. Easy to learn and teach you how to balance but you don't want to actually use it to get around.