131–140 of 272 posts
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Annotations are optional. This is equally valid: fun square(n): n * n end Not that different after all! And I say this as a lover of python and significant whitespace, but not having it at first would be easier.
There should be optional syntax that allows: fun square(n): party in here unfun // no longer having fun here
I've never understood the idea of a 'teaching' programming language. (Modulo examples like Logo and Scratch, which offer much more than a language as part of a wider teaching/computing system.) You spend all this time ramping up on a language, toolchain, library, etc, that you will eventually be unable to leverage beyond a certain point since it is not one used by everyday programmers. The delta in "quality learning"…
This is not entirely unusual, even today. I was curious about one of the toolchains for phone app development. For one particular tool, the tutorial for "Hello World" was many pages of instructions: Installing the tools, creating an empty application, setting its characteristics, adding code, building, etc. Even as an experienced programmer, I found it to be rather forbidding.
Another possible reason for a teaching language might be to excite the interests of particular age or social groups. For instance, Logo was oriented towards making interesting graphics. Scratch eliminates the need to learn syntax, and has easy-to-program graphical output.
On the other hand, some languages come pretty darn close to that old BASIC in terms of the ease of getting started, and one of those languages is Python. It seems to me that the sheer size of Python shouldn't be a deterrent to using it for teaching: Just ignore the advanced features at first.
Example from the OP: fun to-celsius(f): (f - 32) * (5 / 9) end What's the justification for allowing the use of hyphens/dashes in reference names, when underscores would seemingly provide the same purpose? One of the most common problems I notice in newbie code is inconsistency in using whitespace, e.g. `a-b` vs `a - b`, though in that situation, for Python and virtually every other language I've used, those both res…
This therefore is perfectly natural; non-programmers are used to using spaces to delimit words and this is simply doing the same for tokens.
As someone who teaches coding to beginners for a living (I founded One Month and I teach Python to business students at Columbia University), this language looks really intimidating to beginners. Maybe Pyret isn't for beginners, and it's intended to teach people who already have some basic knowledge more advanced concepts like functional programming. That's fine. But to a total beginner, the syntax of Pyret is defini…
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> Languages such as C, Java, Python, and Rust are usually designed by experienced programmers in industry, for experienced programmers in industry. Pyret, on the other hand, is designed by computer science educators, for computer science education. Honestly, looking at the examples on the Pyret main page makes me think that this isn't a good approach at all. I have been in software engineering for many years now and…
What characteristics makes a programming language a " real " programming language?
- has library support for the usual stuff: strings, math, web, database, encoding, etc.
- written using a lower level language (like C, Rust, C++), self hosted (Go) or a mix of those (Dlang, Perl6)
- is actually used to build applications, has some sort of community around it (Rust, Perl, Python, Lua etc.) or some backing (Swift, Java, Go)
I've never understood the idea of a 'teaching' programming language. (Modulo examples like Logo and Scratch, which offer much more than a language as part of a wider teaching/computing system.) You spend all this time ramping up on a language, toolchain, library, etc, that you will eventually be unable to leverage beyond a certain point since it is not one used by everyday programmers. The delta in "quality learning"…
Each level allows you to think to the limit of that world. Only then you see where a new trait fits, how it relates to others. You don't just drown into heavy manuals right of the bat.
What's the point? One would hope they start with a description of why this is better for education than something like Python. I just gave it a quick glance, and it looks like many other programming languages - a bunch of odd text gibberish. I don't think the problem dividing people into "gets it" and "doesn't get it" has anything to do with nuances in syntax or semantics.
No offense but I really don't think it's a good idea to teach beginners a language with such a goofy syntax. It's fine if you want to make a language with a unique and "innovative" syntax. But beginners are best served by learning something mainstream, and ideally simple. They can expand into crazy stuff as they are ready for new languages.
I've never understood the idea of a 'teaching' programming language. (Modulo examples like Logo and Scratch, which offer much more than a language as part of a wider teaching/computing system.) You spend all this time ramping up on a language, toolchain, library, etc, that you will eventually be unable to leverage beyond a certain point since it is not one used by everyday programmers. The delta in "quality learning"…
I've never understood the idea of a 'teaching' programming language. (Modulo examples like Logo and Scratch, which offer much more than a language as part of a wider teaching/computing system.) You spend all this time ramping up on a language, toolchain, library, etc, that you will eventually be unable to leverage beyond a certain point since it is not one used by everyday programmers. The delta in "quality learning"…
Languages such as C, Java, Python, and Rust are usually designed by experienced programmers in industry, for experienced programmers in industry. Pyret, on the other hand, is designed by computer science educators, for computer science education. This does not preclude Pyret from being a useful language for general-purpose programming; it just means that language design decisions are driven foremost by pedagogy. For…
You have drawn privileged lines of your own across programming languages by suggesting that languages designed for education are better in the education context, and that languages designed for engineering are less fit for education. Do you think there is a pedagogical outcome difference arising from programming language difference?
So how much is that difference? How does one demonstrate the additional pedagogical value? Conversely, how does one demonstrate the relative disadvantages of using Python in education? Is the difference from Python -> Pyret an interesting barrier to students of computer science?
Meanwhile, the argument about the cost of maintaining tools and environment stands unchallenged, and the argument about the inertia of moving to a completely different ecosystem remains unchallenged.
PS: What pedagogical literature guides the pedagogically-focused design of this language? I couldn't find any on the website.