Why learning a programming language is a good thing?
With the raise of the personal computer back in the 90s, users had only one thing to do most of the time and that was programming - because back in the old days of gw-basic, ms-dos, borland C, and Turbo Pascal - there was not many games, and the internet was not yet a real thing.The big thing at that time was to develop programs, these could be ms-dos batch files, because users wanted to automate some tasks, or to tweak their autoexec.bat to optimize their system.
Or was it Pascal file, because that's what was taught in school, where IT class were all about learning algorithms, and how to draw fractals, and solve the Tower of Hanoi kind of things.
Back in the days, one page of code could get you a game (might it be Tetris, or Snake, or Arkanoid) - the game were simple and there was more fun in the programming than in the gaming itself.
Nowadays, programs are back to the programmers - most users won't even try to read a source code.
There might be an exception to this with Linux Users - because sometime they have to look under the hood and understand what is going astray with their system after an update...
Back to the question - why is it a good thing to learn a programming language?
Because it sets you free ... with as little as 4 or 5 days of learning you would have started to understand your computer from the inside, you would learn what a compiler is, how and why sometime your computer seems to freeze - and other very useful troubleshooting technique.
For quick little thing, Python can be used as a more advanced scripting language than will take the user further than what the Linux shell will usually get them.
Another cool thing is when you don't have a calculator close at hand - you open a terminal window and type "python" and do your calculation ... it's very handy.
Why Python as a first language?
Educators recommend Python as the beginner language of choice because it is simple and yet has great capabilities. Python code is easy to read and setup good programming style (like indenting), without being too strict on the syntax (compare to c++ or Java who requires to add a semicolon at the end of each line).Python is included on Linux OS - usually Python 2.7 ; it is include on mac system too.
Without any addition you can have access to many library - to manage text, math, time, and many more. And after you have mastered all these you can then access additional libraries that will open your code to graphical interface (if you're running Linux - these additional libraries are easily installed using synaptic - for example for games e.g: sudo apt-get install pyGames )
Another good thing with Python is the overwhelming list of free documentations, resources, video tutorials and help you will find on the internet.
Highly recommended :
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