alt Hacker News> extremely tedious, error prone, and sensitive to details
I've taught people Python as their first language, and this was their exact opinion of it.
When you're an experienced programmer you tend to have a poor gauge of how newcomers internalize things. For people who are brand new it is basically all noise. We're just trying to gradually get them used to the noise. Getting used to the noise while also trying to figure out the difference between strings, numbers, booleans, lists, etc. is more difficult for newcomers than many people realize. Even the concept of scoping can sometimes be too high-level for a beginner, IME.
I like asm from the perspective that, its semantics are extremely simple to explain. And JMP (GOTO) maps cleanly from the flowchart model of programming that most people intuit first.
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My kid is just finishing up a high school intro CS class. A full school year in, and they still have trouble with the fact that their variable and type names must have the exact same capitalization everywhere they're used.
I do realize how difficult this all is, I still have some recollection from how I started to program and how alien it all seemed. And note that I first started with 4 years of C in high-school
However, I don't agree at all that having strings and numbers as different things was ever a problem. On the contrary, explaining that the same data can be interpreted as both 40 and "0" is mistifying and very hard to grok, in my experience. And don't get me started on how hard it is to conceptualize pointers. Or working with the (implicit) stack in assembly instead of being able to use named variables.
IMO Python used to be a great first language, but it's gotten much more complicated over the years. When I'm teaching programming, I want an absolute minimum number of things where I have to say "don't worry about that, it's just boilerplate, you'll learn what it means later."
In particular, Python having generators and making range() be a generator means that in order to fully explain a simple for loop that's supposed to do something X times, I have to explain generators, which are conceptually complicated. When range() just returned a list, it was much easier to explain that it was iterating over a list that I could actually see.