I’m somewhat lucky in that my experience with coding began in a classroom setting in high school, preparing for the AP Comp Sci exam; learning in this setting meant that the basic rules of computer science were drilled into me from my very first encounter with code, such that it didn’t really matter that my first language (Java) is probably a lot less useful than the ones I’ve learned since (Javascript, C, Basic, HTML, Perl). Knowing the basic skeleton of how coding works and implementing best practices from the get-go makes the learning curve in picking up new languages a lot less steep, and it meant that I was able to get pretty far along in my 2 hours with Python on Codecademy.

That being said, Python has some things that are a little unique and harder to get used to, particularly the way in which it’s whitespace-sensitive, its use of colons, and the generic variable types. The whitespace thing just gets annoying when you want to go back and change the way you’ve nested things and have to tab everything over; the colons are kind of nice actually in that they facilitate that tabbing over and make it easier to keep track of where things are; and the fact that I don’t actually have to define whether something is an int, float, bool, etc. is great for ease of coding but makes me worry about type-checking. But all of these things are in the service of making Python as easy to use as possible. They force you to use good spacing and syntax, and the non-specified variable types make things like lists and dicts extremely mutable, to where you really can keep things simple as long as you’re checking your user input.

In terms of relevance to English studies, I think there are definitely corollaries to the way we learn normal languages (grammar, word choice, etc.), but the best connection I can find is formatting and legibility. There’s a tendency when coding to develop your own style and throw best practices out the window, but as I’ve mentioned, keeping up with those practices makes it easier to transition between languages while also making your code easier for others to read and, therefore, modify. In the same way, when writing, structure and formatting are maybe two elements of word “processing” that are also too easily forgotten, particularly when you’re only just starting to write for classes; pedagogically, learning a little bit about the strict guidelines of a language like Python could maybe be a great way to stress the importance of clarity and ease-of-reading to a freshman writing class, or really any class along those lines.