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Hail the new European citizen 
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I'm an old tradition keyboarding myself. Cut/Paste with CTRL+Insert/Shift+Insert. I've got so used to your "New old tradition" that I find that I have to focus for using CTRL+C and CTRL+V.
I have this since 1994, a Microsoft Natural Keyboard (First version) and gone through 5 companies. I use my own keyboard everywhere I go. Still work like new. For some reason this particular one is very soft. I had others same kind of keyboard but they are not as comfortable. I'm very clumsy when comes to other keyboard like laptop, straight and other odd configuration.
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No; used to cheap cherries which are replaced often 
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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I'm typing this on a wireless keyboard (same layout as your new one, which I think is pretty standard) because the native keyboard on this laptop (Asus K53S if it matters) has one show-stopper layout feature. The inverted-T arrow key block is wedged right in so that the up arrow is where my pinkie expects to find the shift key. So for less familiar punctuation, it's "hold shift while I look for the ~ or whatever". So I get a `, a page or two up from where I was typing. 
Cheers,
Peter
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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We have a keyboard on a machine in our lab that has 'Wake', 'Sleep', and 'Power' keys just above the normal Insert, Home, and End keys.
The next time I use the thing and send the machine to sleep in the middle of a debugging session, that keyboard is going to meet a sudden and rather violent end .
Software Zen: delete this;
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I considered buying a Microsoft Surface until I was given one to use for a week at work. The insert key being in the wrong place and require me to hold down the FN key was the only thing I didn't like about it, which was sufficient to stop me buying my own one.
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Oh, they improved the onscreen keyboard some months ago.
It's even worse now.
Now SHIFT and CTRL are not "hold down" keys, so to highlight 5 letters you have to press SHIFT + RIGHT, SHIFT + RIGHT, SHIFT + RIGHT, SHIFT + RIGHT, SHIFT + RIGHT instead of the "Normal" hold SHIFT, RIGHT, RIGHT, RIGHT, RIGHT, RIGHT, release SHIFT 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Maybe it's just a matter of habit?
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Looking into learning it myself (finally), I was reading that Python is becoming much more popular at the high school level, and it has already been well-established as an easy tool to get a lot of stuff done by non-CSC types - which reminds me of the way that classic Visual Basic was used by a lot of folks.
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Edsger W. Dijkstra wrote: It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
So in that sense, Python is the new BASIC.
Ad astra - both ways!
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To be honest, I think this is actually truer:
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students
And I think the fault lies first in the teacher, second in the language. While I could teach good programming in BASIC, I wouldn't really want to, but in fact it is actually easier to teach good programming in a highly constrained language. Now, given "modern" languages with their generics, templates, classes, interfaces, lambda expressions, typeless or typed, etc., features, teaching good programming is harder for the simple reason that nobody actually seems to teach programming principles and then how to apply those principles to a particular language. Instead, they teach the language and then say "oh, you just learned about so-and-so principle." Bassackwards.
The result is the experience I see with the junior devs out of college. "Jeez, I wish they had taught me that in school" pretty much anytime I talk about good programming practices.
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Marc Clifton wrote: The result is the experience I see with the junior devs out of college. "Jeez, I wish they had taught me that in school" pretty much anytime I talk about good programming practices.
Before we start learning good programming, I would first let them build a single board computer and then let them learn machinne language and implement a simple BIOS themselves.
After that they are ready for a lot more and may actually not be afraid of anything anymore.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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Edsger W. Dijkstra wrote: It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
It is a poor craftsman who blames the tools for his failures.
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Probably. There are some very good tools available, like Jupyter Notebook which make it really great tool for teaching, all on web. And then there are numpy and other libs making it great tool for math. Good to learn basic concepts.
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Working in the scientific community, Python is well-established and is mainly used as an improvement upon and a cheaper version of IDL. It has some very powerful features and is pretty fast.
However I see it (personally) more as a tool for smaller tasks, than for real software development. For several reasons:
* It's primarely a scripting language
* It's not really OO based, not as java, C++ or C#
* It's kind of hard to get some large, intuitive development out of it
* When having multiple Python versions it's really Hic Sunt Dracones on libraries and environments (see today's xkcd: Python Environment )
A good skill for under your belt, but not the magic they claim it to be.
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 That's great! And the mouseover on that xkcd is hysterical. And soooo true. But not just for Python -- for anything *nix!
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When BASIC was cool, yes. BASIC is no longer cool. Python is, especially to get something up and running quickly, leverage a huge code base, write stuff that is actually useful for SBC's, and have cross-platform compatibility.
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Isn't C# cool ?
«... thank the gods that they have made you superior to those events which they have not placed within your own control, rendered you accountable for that only which is within you own control For what, then, have they made you responsible? For that which is alone in your own power—a right use of things as they appear.» Discourses of Epictetus Book I:12
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No. It's the old basic in a new wrapper.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
-----
You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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Yeah, it's used in middle school computer science courses too.
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I'm may the odd one out, but I count myself lucky not having to deal with this slithering snake. I used to code in VB.NET and I hated it where a _ is required to break a line. Old FORTRAN required to start data or statement with specific column. Old VI editor requires switch toggle insert to edit. This Python requires indentation to mark code block and space to mark line break.
It just brings to many of those bad memories to deal with just archaic requirement. I would gladly use {} and ; to state my intention any time.
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That's what baffled me too when I learned Python for the first time.
Using indentation to mark code block? That's worse than BEGIN and END keyword!
What if I deleted a space accidentally? There will no error message at all.
No IDE error. No Compile error. Until some angry user phones me.
I would rather leave this thing alone.
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Hmm, not strictly true, as you would know if you'd ever used it in anger! 8)
Having progressed through FORTRAN/Assembler/Algol60/68R/C/C++ etc, I too was surprised at the use of spacing to delineate blocks of code, but (and especially with a good IDE) it really isn't an issue, and is certainly no worse than the (to me completely daft) Java convention of opening a block at the end of a line, but closing it at the beginning of some random line later on. The number of times I've misread a piece of code because I didn't notice the brace at the end of a long line (yes, I know, my failing!)...
Having done extensive dev in Python over some years now, everything from responsive web apps to OS loaders to processing compressed files too large to unpack to disk, in umpteen environments and OSs, I've come to appreciate just how good it is. Like every language it has its quirks and sillinesses, but the indentation isn't really one of them!
As always, for most dev, the language is unimportant, its the programming that matters - but you won't convince the religious (language) nutters of that, of course!
All IMHO, of course 8)
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