Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Help me convince a teacher we should learn Python (vs VB.net)

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 80 posts

Re: Ask HN: Help me convince a teacher we should learn Python (vs VB.net)

#41

Post by c1sc0 »

1. Python is Free (Free as in Freedom vs. free as in beer debate) 2. Python teaches you the importance of whitespace 3. Python forces clarity in your coding 4. Python is blackboard-compatible, it's a great pseudo-language. 5. Python has a great REPL 6. Python is great for both scripting and OOP 7. Real Hackers use it ;-)

Good luck! Just curious: do you guys have whiteboards or blackboards in class these days? Somehow teaching programming on a blackboard seems more appropriate & terminal-like to me.

Re: Ask HN: Help me convince a teacher we should learn Python (vs VB.net)

#42

Post by rsaarelm »

tkahn6 wrote: post #2

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. - Edsger Dijkstra

I've always found this quote (apparently originally from 1975) somewhat strange, having grown up in 1980s, when BASIC was pretty close to the only game in town for a decade for home users. I still ended up seeing a lot more skilled programmers get started by early tinkering rather than through dutifully attending a college course in the formal derivation and verification of software constructs after having carefully kept themselves unsullied of writing programs without being absolutely sure what they are doing.

There may be a point in the underlying sentiment, but the thing as a whole just rings false in the post-microcomputer age. The big difference might be that the people Dijkstra was thinking of probably had had BASIC taught to them as university students, instead of tinkering with the BASIC repl of the 8-bit microcomputer they got their hands on as 9-year olds.

Re: Ask HN: Help me convince a teacher we should learn Python (vs VB.net)

#43

Post by SandB0x »

I would be making the same fuss in your position, however your teacher might not feel confident teaching a language he doesn't know, despite all the good talking points raised here. If he sticks with VB, I would ask him to spend some time later in the course making students aware that there are other languages, styles and platforms. Offer to help - write him a couple of pages on it, or pick a simple program from his course and translate it into Python/Ruby/C/Scheme/etc for him. Good luck.

Edit: To the person who disagrees with my advice, could you please let me know which part and why.

Re: Ask HN: Help me convince a teacher we should learn Python (vs VB.net)

#44

Post by axod »

gruseom wrote: post #33

It's a bad sign that most of these comments (about 20, as I'm typing this) are trying to talk this kid out of his enthusiasm for Python in defense of -- heaven help us -- VB.Net. Come on, people. If we can't do better than that on Hacker fricking News, perhaps the doomsayers are right after all and this neighborhood is done. Hold on, newsisan, there are thousands of Python hackers here. Let's see if any cavalry ride…

I'd say there's likely more VB jobs around. Secondly, learning a crap language first is often a really good idea. It shows you what not to do. It's like having a failed startup and then having a success - you learn from that failure.

And thirdly, it just doesn't matter that much. You should be learning programming. Not programming.

Re: Ask HN: Help me convince a teacher we should learn Python (vs VB.net)

#46

Post by roel_v »

I went to a school where OO was taught with Smalltalk (late 1990's). The pressure had been on the school for a few years to switch to Java, because that was the language of the future, and Smalltalk wasn't used in the industry anyway, and why were they sticking with such an old-fashioned language, and were the teachers too stupid to learn anything new.

So in the end they caved, and I was in the first class that was taught the Java curriculum. The teachers had spend the larger part of their summer at Java courses and writing a syllabus. The result was a bunch of people who barely knew the language they were teaching, causing most of the time in class to be lost to mundane details like working with the JDK and API issues. (I remember asking how to execute an external program and nobody being able to tell me).

YMMV etc., but my advice: please let the teacher decide for himself what he feels most comfortable teaching and focus on programming fundamentals rather than complain about not being able to use a tool that is hip and cool in some circles. (read the 'the scene will kill you' article that was on here a few days ago, it holds for not only 'the startup scene' but also for pretty much all niche programming scenes, forum scenes like slashdot, reddit, HN; actually it holds for pretty much every scene in the world).

Re: Ask HN: Help me convince a teacher we should learn Python (vs VB.net)

#47

Post by dansingerman »

gruseom wrote: post #33

It's a bad sign that most of these comments (about 20, as I'm typing this) are trying to talk this kid out of his enthusiasm for Python in defense of -- heaven help us -- VB.Net. Come on, people. If we can't do better than that on Hacker fricking News, perhaps the doomsayers are right after all and this neighborhood is done. Hold on, newsisan, there are thousands of Python hackers here. Let's see if any cavalry ride…

Community is surely the big win for Python. If you manage to get a 17 year old interested in programming, then where better to take the next step than start hacking on some open source projects written in Python?

Where does a 17-year old go next with VB.net?

Re: Ask HN: Help me convince a teacher we should learn Python (vs VB.net)

#48

Post by roel_v »

gruseom wrote: post #33

It's a bad sign that most of these comments (about 20, as I'm typing this) are trying to talk this kid out of his enthusiasm for Python in defense of -- heaven help us -- VB.Net. Come on, people. If we can't do better than that on Hacker fricking News, perhaps the doomsayers are right after all and this neighborhood is done. Hold on, newsisan, there are thousands of Python hackers here. Let's see if any cavalry ride…

"talk this kid out of his enthusiasm for Python in defense of -- heaven help us -- VB.Net."

I don't think that's the point nor is it what most people are doing. In an introduction to programming course, the language is a tool in which the concepts taught are illustrated. Letting the teacher use a tool that he is comfortable with will by far outweigh any advantages that using another language will bring.

Think about it this way: to learn how to drive Formula 1, does it matter if you learn how to drive a stick shift in a Ferrari or a Toyota Corolla? IMO no. (in this analogy it would be safer to learn in the Toyota, but I won't take it that far in the programming case...).

Re: Ask HN: Help me convince a teacher we should learn Python (vs VB.net)

#49

Post by kogir »

What's the course's angle? If it's an intro course like it sounds, you're probably going to have a hard time. Like it or not, an intro course is for teaching basics that are shared across all languages, with an added goal of inspiring students to want to learn more.

My high school programming course started with "Karel the Robot." (http://karel.sourceforge.net/). It's not even a "real" programming language, but it worked quite well to teach the basics of state, control flow, functions, etc. My "Aha!" moment was shortly after that when I pointed and clicked my way to a not-horrible PacMan game in VB.NET.

Then I was sold. I'd made something fun that I could put on a floppy and show off to my friends; All without knowing the first thing about pixels, graphics contexts, layouts, or (heaven forbid) html and css. I just had a timer, some images, and a big switch statement for keyboard input.

If your teacher is trying to ignite his students' interest in the same way mine was, you're going to need to convince him that accomplishing the same thing is as easily done in python. From what I've seen it's not -- UI libraries are hard. (His choice of VB.NET almost certainly implies there will be some simple WinForms drag and drop UI work happening)

I guess what I'm trying to say is that while python is a great language, it may not be the best tool for this job. I can't tell without seeing his lesson plan, but based on my experience learning to program, python wouldn't have left me feeling as empowered (at the start).

Intro to programming isn't about languages, it's about showing people that they can make the computer do their bidding, so that they can work less and/or have more fun.

Re: Ask HN: Help me convince a teacher we should learn Python (vs VB.net)

#50

Post by roel_v »

dansingerman wrote: post #47
gruseom wrote: post #33

It's a bad sign that most of these comments (about 20, as I'm typing this) are trying to talk this kid out of his enthusiasm for Python in defense of -- heaven help us -- VB.Net. Come on, people. If we can't do better than that on Hacker fricking News, perhaps the doomsayers are right after all and this neighborhood is done. Hold on, newsisan, there are thousands of Python hackers here. Let's see if any cavalry ride…

Community is surely the big win for Python. If you manage to get a 17 year old interested in programming, then where better to take the next step than start hacking on some open source projects written in Python? Where does a 17-year old go next with VB.net?

You'd throw a 17 year old with 40 hours worth of 'introduction to programming with Python' into hacking on Django or Scons? Good luck with that.

(not that I know of any open source projects in VB.net, but still)

Post reply on HN