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Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities

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Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities

#151

Post by icambron »

rayalez wrote: post #138
icambron wrote: post #109

I've always been of two minds about this. My intro course at MIT was in Scheme, a class that has since been renamed and is now taught using Python. On the one hand, it was a great course, and the FP was an awesome mindfuck (previous programming experience: TI BASIC). Though I took it all for granted at the time, it definitely set me up to think about programming better for years, and I still reread the book sometimes…

I'm not sure that this is what you're looking for, but just so you know - there's a lisp written on top of python: http://hylang.org It's relatively new, but I'm really excited about it, and that is what I'm learning, it allows you to get the benefits of learning lisp and python at the same time. It's compatible with python in both directions, so you can use it in any practical project - with django or with machine l…

That does seem like a nice option, and sort of what I was going for with my Clojure suggestion. And I suspect that mostly any Lisp will do for SICP's purposes.

Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities

#152

Post by [deleted] »

yminsky wrote: post #142
pgbovine wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. Thanks for your comments blahedo. I'm a bit short on time right now, but I will convert some parts of this response into more coherent form and edit my article accordingly to clarify. I'll address each of your paragraphs in turn: 1.) Re: CS0 vs. CS1. Like you mentioned, I was very upfront about the methodology for this analysis. And I am very aware that most CS majors do not ever take a CS0 course. But p…

ML (OCaml and SML) seems to get short shrift in your analysis. CS51 at Harvard is in OCaml. Brown's cs017 is OCaml, Scheme, Scala and Java. Penn's CS120 is OCaml (I think. It definitely used to be, but I can't find the course online anymore. You can reach out to Benjamin Pierce to ask, though.) And CMU has an SML-based FP course as part of their intro sequence None of this is to deny the fact that Python is highly po…

[deleted]

Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities

#153

Post by yminsky »

pgbovine wrote: post #148
yminsky wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ML (OCaml and SML) seems to get short shrift in your analysis. CS51 at Harvard is in OCaml. Brown's cs017 is OCaml, Scheme, Scala and Java. Penn's CS120 is OCaml (I think. It definitely used to be, but I can't find the course online anymore. You can reach out to Benjamin Pierce to ask, though.) And CMU has an SML-based FP course as part of their intro sequence None of this is to deny the fact that Python is highly po…

Thanks, will look into those and update accordingly. However, Harvard CS51 doesn't count as CS1 since CS50 is already its CS1 course. (But please correct me if I'm wrong.)

I would have thought cs50 is a cs0 course, and cs51 is the cs1. cs50 is the concentrators-and-non-concentrators course that's all flash and fun. What do you think is the cs0 at Harvard?

As for your point about Penn's CS120, I guess I don't fully understand the criterion. From the way you described it, CS120 seems like a CS1 course: not for someone who has had zero programming, but the very first course taken by most CS concentrators.

FWIW, I spoke to Benjamin Pierce about the structure of the course, and he said he didn't want to use "Real World OCaml" because it's too early of a course: he has students who he thinks don't yet understand things like what a scope is. From the sense I got from him, it's quite early in the curriculum.

That said, this is mostly minor quibbling. I think there's little doubt that "very early" courses, for some reasonable definition of "very early", lean towards Python. And reasonably so.

Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities

#154

Post by BuckRogers »

Alupis wrote: post #70
maxerickson wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think the flavor of Python taught matters? I would say that compared to learning how to write and understand a small program, the difference between Python 2.x and Python 3.x is trivial. (I'm talking about learning the language; for a large Python 2.x code base, the transition to 3.x is likely to have unclear payoff.)

Well, from my perspective, students should learn on current gen tech, be it Python 3.x or Java 8, C++11, etc. I agree that simply learning some programming has no bearing on the language version, etc... however, as students get familiar and start to experiment on their own, they may learn "the old way" of doing things. There is no downside to teaching Python 3.x, there might be a downside to teaching 2.7.x.

Yeah there is a downside to 3.x. The transition has failed from what we can see. It was released in 2008. It's 2014 and it's still the used by the (vast) minority of people in the Python community.

Programming isn't one of those fields, like most things in life- where 'the latest version' is always the right choice.

The best way to explain it... it's like saying everyone should adopt Windows 8, that there's no downsides.

It's hard to explain that to someone who isn't in the trenches using it because it goes against peoples natural urge to be 'updated'. Unfortunately, this transition hasn't worked out- no one is saying it but it has pretty much failed. Turned into a 20 year transition. Red Hat is supporting Python2.7 until 2027. Core dev team till 2020. Guido van Rossum works at Dropbox, who started working on a new JIT compiler (Pyston)- this year that is targeting Python 2.7. There are actual performance regressions in Python3. I'd wait this one out for a while longer. Python 2.7 is only 4 years old and the stability to the language has actually been a boon rather than churning out flawed release after flawed release like many Python3 versions have been.

To be honest, if someone forks Python2.7 and continues that branch, that's where I'll be going. Not to 3. That will be the end of 3, I assure you. That will be a -huge- downside to teaching Python3. :)

This transition is not in the bag yet.

Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities

#155

Post by pgbovine »

pgbovine wrote: post #148
yminsky wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ML (OCaml and SML) seems to get short shrift in your analysis. CS51 at Harvard is in OCaml. Brown's cs017 is OCaml, Scheme, Scala and Java. Penn's CS120 is OCaml (I think. It definitely used to be, but I can't find the course online anymore. You can reach out to Benjamin Pierce to ask, though.) And CMU has an SML-based FP course as part of their intro sequence None of this is to deny the fact that Python is highly po…

Thanks, will look into those and update accordingly. However, Harvard CS51 doesn't count as CS1 since CS50 is already its CS1 course. (But please correct me if I'm wrong.)

(arg can't reply to your reply) this is actually quite important ... let me keep looking into this. sorry there's a giant backlog of (often angry!) emails in my inbox right now ... might not be able to sort thru them all :)

i wish the blogging platform supported some version-control friendly format.

[Edit: I made a typo about Penn CS120 ... I mistakenly found another course named CS120 that wasn't at Penn. Also, Harvard CS51 calls itself "Computer Science II" [1], implying that it's a CS2 course. It probably has CS50 as a prereq, tho I haven't double-checked yet.]

[1] http://cs51.seas.harvard.edu/docs/lectures/2013/1-overview.p...

Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities

#156

Post by zwass »

pgbovine wrote: post #148
yminsky wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ML (OCaml and SML) seems to get short shrift in your analysis. CS51 at Harvard is in OCaml. Brown's cs017 is OCaml, Scheme, Scala and Java. Penn's CS120 is OCaml (I think. It definitely used to be, but I can't find the course online anymore. You can reach out to Benjamin Pierce to ask, though.) And CMU has an SML-based FP course as part of their intro sequence None of this is to deny the fact that Python is highly po…

Thanks, will look into those and update accordingly. However, Harvard CS51 doesn't count as CS1 since CS50 is already its CS1 course. (But please correct me if I'm wrong.)

I went to Penn and TAed for some lower level CS courses (but not 120).

CIS120 is the course for students who have some programming experience, and probably falls under CS1. I had taken AP Java AB before and was overprepared for the old (Java) version of the course. The current course teaches basic data structures and uses Ocaml.

Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities

#157

Post by cma »

aikah wrote: post #57
Igglyboo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to read and it just makes more sense when someone only knows English. I could show this to my 80 year old grandmother and have her understand what it does with minimal help on my part. word_list = ["hat", "dog", "cat"] for word in word_list: print(word) The same example in Java isn't extremely hard to understand, but it definitely is a decent jump in complexity from the almost plain English syntax of Python…

My first language was AS3.And I'm glad it was. Types dont make things more complicated. Most languages have types and I prefer dealing with them explicitely rather than letting an interpreter do random coercion like Javascript. Types lead to cleaner programming,instead of shoving random stuffs into an untyped list,a dev has to think about data structures. Furthermore,as a non native english speaker,I dont find python…

Python doesn't do random coercion, except bool to int.

Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities

#158

Post by marcosdumay »

Stubb wrote: post #115
advocaat23 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to HN! Ruby is a good idea for webdev but keep in mind that Python is also dominant in other domains of computing in particular scripting and scientific computing. So in my opinion for a beginner Python is more future proof than Ruby [activate language-flamewar-prevention-daemon] and if you later add a system-language (e.g. C) and a modern general purpose language (e.g. Haskell or Scheme/LISP) to your reperto…

> So in my opinion for a beginner Python is more future proof than Ruby Which is more future proof: Python v2 or Python v3? I figured that I was least likely to regret Ruby for a green-field data analysis project. So far it's been a delightful experience.

The differences are very small. Whatever you learn, you'll be at home in both.

Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities

#159

Post by Alupis »

BuckRogers wrote: post #154
Alupis wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, from my perspective, students should learn on current gen tech, be it Python 3.x or Java 8, C++11, etc. I agree that simply learning some programming has no bearing on the language version, etc... however, as students get familiar and start to experiment on their own, they may learn "the old way" of doing things. There is no downside to teaching Python 3.x, there might be a downside to teaching 2.7.x.

Yeah there is a downside to 3.x. The transition has failed from what we can see. It was released in 2008. It's 2014 and it's still the used by the (vast) minority of people in the Python community. Programming isn't one of those fields, like most things in life- where 'the latest version' is always the right choice. The best way to explain it... it's like saying everyone should adopt Windows 8, that there's no downsi…

Well, from the python.org website:

> Short version: Python 2.x is legacy, Python 3.x is the present and future of the language[1]

This should be enough of a reason for classes to move to 3.x.

Regarding your "in the trenches comment", remember, most of the folk on HN are involved in software engineering in some capacity, myself included.

No doubt it has taken a long time to move into 3.x, and it may take a while still. That doesn't make an argument to teach students a language dialect that, according to it's maintainers, is legacy.

> In particular, instructors introducing Python to new programmers may want to consider teaching Python 3 first and then introducing the differences in Python 2 afterwards (if necessary), since Python 3 eliminates many quirks that can unnecessarily trip up beginning programmers trying to learn Python 2. [1]

As I mentioned before, most (all?) of the major Python libraries have now been ported to support 3.x, so this leaves little reason to start out learning 2.x (unless you are setting out to maintain an old codebase, but we are talking about academics here and new beginners, so that point is moot).

[1] https://wiki.python.org/moin/Python2orPython3

Re: Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities

#160

Post by Alupis »

argonaut wrote: post #118
Alupis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You linked to Grad School rankings -- hardly what anyone would consider "beginner programming courses".

Grad school rankings are a proxy for the strength of the professors, grad students (who TA/grade classes), and the overall CS research strength.

Bachelor level students do not conduct research... so it seems odd to rank schools for their Bachelor CS degree program based off of stats about their Graduate CS programs. (this thread is about beginner programming courses, ie. undergrad students). -- as a footnote, at least at my school, the graduate level professors are not the same ones teaching undergrad classes.
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