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comment by nowaypablo
nowaypablo  ·  3810 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Is Coding the New Literacy?

First-year (freshman) West Point students (called plebes btw ) are required to take a programming/coding/computer engineering course for a full year. They're trained on a learning-friendly combination of Java and Python called Jython. So according to the US Army, apparently coding is a new literacy:D

sidenote: I hadn't heard of Jython prior to visiting WP. Are you familiar? If so, I plan to get crackin' this summer on learning code and I'm wondering where the best place is to start.





user-inactivated  ·  3809 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Jython isn't a 'learning-friendly combination of java and Python', it's an implementation of the Python programming language for the JRE (Java Runtime Environment).

What this means is that normal Python compiles down to a set of ptyon opcodes that are executed by the python runtime, but Jython instead compiles down to a set of JRE opcodes (so does Java normally).

if you're not familiar with the idea, think of compiling as translating from 1 form to another. In this case opcodes are performant because they can be optimized for machines to read instead of people (in a nutshell, lots of details missing).