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Advice on learning Python efficiently

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Re: Advice on learning Python efficiently

#21

Post by joatmon-snoo »

majewsky wrote: post #10
mirekrusin wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read c# spec when it was in beta, going fast through it, skimming less informative parts, taking quick notes as bullet points in form of single statement or question. It was one of the best experiences, it put me in flow mode and I learned a lot in very short time. I used c# later professionally and never had problems. Great thing about language specs is that is very precise, without mistakes. The art is to read+sk…

> Great thing about language specs is that is very precise, without mistakes. I'd also add "concise" to the list of required traits for a good language spec. If you don't believe me that's important, go check out the C++ specification. IIRC it contains some 50 pages of rules on how to choose implementations of an overloaded function.

And if you're looking at modern C++, you also get to learn about lvalues, glvalues, xvalues, rvalues, and prvalues!

Re: Advice on learning Python efficiently

#22

Post by brudgers »

ManlyBread wrote: post #8

>It's called Pyret. How about just learning Python instead of learning a toy language and then having to learn Python anyway?

Pyret came out of the PLTgroup, the group of educators responsible for the Racket ecosystem and before that MzScheme. They have been studying and innovating on programming pedagogy for more than two decades.

What sets the PLTgroup apart, in my mind, is that it tends to row in the same direction at the low level. This has allowed it to create a robust platform upon which tools (particularly in the form of languages) can be built. Pyret is an example of this. Adding a language with the offside rule to the ecosystem doesn't cause anyone offense or raging flame wars or fuck-you forking. Imagine a PEP to add Lisp syntax to Python.

Instead, Pyret just gets rolled up into the pedagogy that is described in How To Design Programs because Pyret fits with the philosophy of building teaching languages for the purposes of teaching. Other PLTgroup languages range from Beginning Student Language (a simplified lisp) up through Racklog (a lisp implementation of Prolog's logic programming model) and pure insanity like Scribble which introduces a documentation phase to the compilation. Racket even ships with an Algol60 implementation.

At the core, the important philosophical idea is that learning programming is not learning a language. In the age of Googling into StackOverflow, that's even more the case as far as I can see.

Re: Advice on learning Python efficiently

#23

Post by jMyles »

Teaching and learning are spaces where many flowers can bloom, so I can appreciate the angle of this article (and thus Pyret).

To zoom in for a second: in my experience teaching, the simplicity of the outdent as a mechanism for ending a control structure is a light-bulb moment for many people. I don't think that adding "end" is helpful for this segment of the population.

And so it is with `where`, which seems to shoehorn a BDD / Rspec'ish approach which, while typical of some of the best Ruby out there, is not typical of a Python library.

Again, this approach may be great for some people, but I'll bet that it won't be great for others.

Re: Advice on learning Python efficiently

#24

Post by icholy »

ManlyBread wrote: post #8

>It's called Pyret. How about just learning Python instead of learning a toy language and then having to learn Python anyway?

Right? The only reason I got hooked on coding was because I was making cool things. Good practice and CS fundamentals came later. If programming was introduced to me in this "bottom up" approach, I would have lost interest. Math education has the same problem.

Re: Advice on learning Python efficiently

#25

Post by natec425 »

volkk wrote: post #19
ManlyBread wrote: post #8

>It's called Pyret. How about just learning Python instead of learning a toy language and then having to learn Python anyway?

yeah i don't think i fully understand. my first language that got me introduced to programming was python and it taught me all the basics of OOP that were important to really get me going. it's a great language with little magic. after, i moved on to java and eventually functional languages.

I do think Python is an acceptable language for beginners, but I wouldn't say it has little magic. It may feel intuitive at times, but Python's magic methods can be somewhat disorienting for students. This usually hits when students reach for-loops (and to some extent during branching due to __bool__).

Also, Python may feel like a small language at times, but it is really quite large and complex. This can be seem by imagining a beginners perspective when Googling for help with a simple list operation. The inevitable Stack Overflow answer will almost certainly use a comprehension. I would argue that Pyret is actually fundamentally less complex than than Python.

As always, the biggest issues are your goals, constraints, and resources. If you can afford to spend time in a language optimized for education, that is fantastic. If you can't afford that time, python starts to look like a good trade off relative to the languages with reasonable job prospects.

* It doesn't make me an expert, but I do teach programming for a living. We use happily use python for introductory content and server-side web content, but I can easily see Pyret as a great option for an educational offering with different constraints than mine.

Re: Advice on learning Python efficiently

#26

Post by webmaven »

joatmon-snoo wrote: post #21
majewsky wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Great thing about language specs is that is very precise, without mistakes. I'd also add "concise" to the list of required traits for a good language spec. If you don't believe me that's important, go check out the C++ specification. IIRC it contains some 50 pages of rules on how to choose implementations of an overloaded function.

And if you're looking at modern C++, you also get to learn about lvalues, glvalues, xvalues, rvalues, and prvalues!

prvalues are the ones that return a promise about a system's future state which are commonly expected to prove false, right?

Re: Advice on learning Python efficiently

#27

Post by volkk »

natec425 wrote: post #25
volkk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah i don't think i fully understand. my first language that got me introduced to programming was python and it taught me all the basics of OOP that were important to really get me going. it's a great language with little magic. after, i moved on to java and eventually functional languages.

I do think Python is an acceptable language for beginners, but I wouldn't say it has little magic. It may feel intuitive at times, but Python's magic methods can be somewhat disorienting for students. This usually hits when students reach for-loops (and to some extent during branching due to __bool__). Also, Python may feel like a small language at times, but it is really quite large and complex. This can be seem by…

fair argument. this was in college, so i had a lot of resources available and very particularly picked curricula so i didn't bump into any of the magic methods until i graduated college and used python in production.

Re: Advice on learning Python efficiently

#28

Post by dwaynecrooks »

ManlyBread wrote: post #8

>It's called Pyret. How about just learning Python instead of learning a toy language and then having to learn Python anyway?

Well, first off it's just a suggestion so take it with a grain of salt and ultimately do what works for you.

But I see your point and I did struggle with whether to include it or not. I think me wanting to share the great work I see Shriram Krishnamurthi (https://cs.brown.edu/~sk/) and others (Matthias Felleisen, http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/ for another example) are doing and have been doing for decades to advance Computer Science education and really tackle the tough problems pushed me to include it in the end.

I'm just a fan of their work and this post felt like a great time to mention it.

However, I do share your feelings that most people should just jump in and learn Python as their first language. It's easy to get started, batteries included and there's plenty of resources and people to help them if they get stuck.

Re: Advice on learning Python efficiently

#29

Post by jerf »

ManlyBread wrote: post #8

>It's called Pyret. How about just learning Python instead of learning a toy language and then having to learn Python anyway?

Python has gotten hard to learn. It's not too bad if learning it just to learn, or learning it in a classroom setting with a careful plan, but I've witnessed people trying to learn it professionally in the context of getting testing running, and it's hard to learn when trying to use a mature Python codebase that uses Python thoroughly. There's these decorators, and iterators vs. functions, and things using introspection to do invisible things, and on and on it goes.

Python used to be easy to learn. It isn't anymore. It may be a better language for all the feature additions, but it isn't easy to learn anymore and I no longer recommend it for that purpose. (I don't have a recommendation at the moment.)

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