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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

#291

Post by andrewstuart »

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…

>>>> it's still the used by the (vast) minority of people in the Python community.

You sound so certain. Tell me exactly the number of people using Python 3? Not a percentage or something else without meaning. Real numbers. Don't know eh?

Why do people keep spouting such "facts"?

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

#292

Post by andrewstuart »

BuckRogers wrote: post #209
Alupis wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One good reason why you'd want to use 2 for learning is that any job would be using 2. 95%+ percentile chance. It's not worth debating you on this if you don't work in Python for your day job. There's just so many misconceptions in what you've said. From the way it sounds, you don't, and Python3 is hardly a dialect. The challenges of Python3 aren't for me or you, it's for library maintainers. And anyone with years of…

Dogmatism is the reason to stick rigidily to python 2.

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

#293

Post by andrewstuart »

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…

"From what we can see?"

Who, the royal we? Or do you mean "I think it, so everyone else does too"?

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

#294

Post by jrochkind1 »

jhowell wrote: post #288
bicubic wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so happy to hear that! I graduated from Monash Clayton a few years ago when the Java train was in full effect and the focus on Java was a big source of frustration for me. I distinctly remember an algorithms & data structures assignment about Markov chains which had to be done in Java. I spent a good 40 minutes writing what was effectively boilerplate to load the provided files into a meaningful representation an…

Regarding "small projects," how useful are they in motivating learners to continue the learning the language? Having robust tooling introduces overhead initially (and to be honest, seemingly eternally), but also makes the impractical possible.

The goals of a first year CS class probably don't include motivating learners to continue learning any particular language; they may include motivating the learners to continue learning CS and/or programming in general.

My first year CS data structures class was in scheme, as used to be popular. I enjoyed the class a lot, leanred a lot, and also found it very challenging. I think scheme was perfect for it. But I had no particular desire to continue with scheme afterwords, which is fine. (Not because I have anything against scheme, but on to other things).

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

#295

Post by zo1 »

hans0l074 wrote: post #251
candeira wrote: post #106

I work at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Last year we moved our foundational course in data structures and algorithms from Java to Python, with great success. This is a course that used to be taught in C, then moved to Java. I tutored it as a Java course, and was in charge of adapting the tutorial (classroom exercises) and laboratory (programming assignments) materials when we started using Python to teac…

I do not know any Python (yet) - and my comment is probably off-topic. I spent a fall semester at Northeastern U, Boston in '97 and took a graduate course in Data Structures which was taught in C. I loved this course and finished top of the class (It helped that I was already familiar with C from an undergrad engg course). I fell in love with C. Implementing dequeues, linked lists, trees etc. with C was a pleasure -…

Most of that article is rendered moot with this section:

"Now, I freely admit that programming with pointers is not needed in 90% of the code written today, and in fact, it's downright dangerous in production code. OK. That's fine. And functional programming is just not used much in practice. Agreed.

But it's still important for some of the most exciting programming jobs."

Pretty much saying that everything he just spoke to us is purely for the "exciting programming jobs". And let's face it, most of us do not have that unless we go out of our way to pigeon hole business problems into being fun and exciting.

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

#296

Post by 6d0debc071 »

toyg wrote: post #289
6d0debc071 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess you agree that "impressionable students" should be taught that collaboration is essential, hence clear formatting is necessary and precise indentation (aka whitespace) is critical. Not particularly, no. Or at least I think that should be the IDE's problem.

*> Not particularly, no. Or at least I think that should be the IDE's problem. You still have to tell the IDE what to do with your code, which you do with brackets, I guess? So now your code is full of brackets and parentheses, which are naturally less readable (how many levels of parentheses do you use in natural language?), and their role is almost entirely to... help the IDE indent your code.

About as many carriage returns as I use in natural language. The act of inserting any sort of punctuation seems inherently approximate; an attempt to encode that which is usually transmitted in tone, rhythm, body language.

People, even before computers, invented several different types of formal logic notation just so that they'd have a language that was better suited to these sorts of puzzles. I don't think that code is a good approximation of natural language, nor do I think that it should try to be. Natural language is very poorly suited to expressing layers of abstraction, and even basic logical relationships.

Of course it's easier to write programs that resemble natural language, just as it's also easier to speak than it is to write Vx[Yx->...etc...] but that doesn't mean it's the best way to look at a problem.

#

But that's a bit besides the point. You can do it however you like, even with whitespace if that's your preference. The key is that the IDE has to be aware of the meaning of your code. Python's solution to that is to assert by fiat that the white space should be a syntactically meaningful unit in this sense, but it could be anything.

If you have the information there, then people can look at it and write it however they please.

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

#297

Post by theandrewbailey »

pgbovine wrote: post #208
pgbovine wrote: post #163

Author here: Please email course correction requests to philip@pgbovine.net ... I'll probably miss a few important corrections amidst the hundreds of comments. As a clarification, a CS0 or CS1 course usually has no CS prerequisites , so if a course you're trying to mention has other CS prereqs, then it's probably not CS0 or CS1. ha, feel free to DOWNVOTE so that this appears at the very bottom, so that it's visible :…

wow y'all are really bad at downvoting this comment; it's still hidden in the middle :) why does it have 4 points?!?

This community appreciates creators coming, sharing, explaining, and answering questions about their work.

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

#298

Post by theandrewbailey »

Igglyboo wrote: post #15

I think Python is the perfect first language for beginners. Yea we all know it's not fast or low level or the best language to teach about types or advanced CS topics etc. But it is extremely readable and easy to understand, it makes coding fun and once the students are engaged and know the basics it is much easier to teach more advanced concepts like typing and memory allocation.

Python was my first programming language 10 years ago. Right now, I'm using it to teach programming to an English major. He's using it to make text based games. That dating sim was sorta insulting.

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

#299

Post by ToastyMallows »

david_b wrote: post #285

OT: Since I don't have permissions for an Ask-type post I'll do this here. The lines in this thread break extremely 'late' ( http://imgur.com/IzmwWBo ), causing me a lot of painful sideways scrolling - my screen only has a 1024x600 resolution, but all other threads I have open look normal ( http://imgur.com/Q45ZDQ6 ). What causes this and how can I get rid of it (FF30 with NoScript and Disconnect)?

Same here, Chrome 35, all extensions disabled. Oddly, if I open this page up Incognito (logged out), it works fine.

Even more off topic, horizontal scrolling can be less of a pain if you just hold shift and scroll up and down.

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

#300

Post by franparga95 »

jarrett wrote: post #96
franparga95 wrote: post #32

Hey there! I've just started learning to code for building web apps (I know about Fortran 90, it doesn't fit very well on the browser haha), and it took me a while to decide. I looked up in an endless number of hacker websites, but at the end I'm sorry for betraying Python lovers... I'm learning ruby on rails..! I've just started learning, please tell me If it's best to learn python (I'm not looking for an easy langu…

My take on Ruby vs Python is this: While Python has a healthy web dev ecosystem, Ruby's feels much larger to me. That's almost certainly because Rails is so wildly popular. And Rails is an excellent, mature framework. So for web dev, I would consider Ruby the winner. Python is the clear winner for scientific computing. That's not really due to anything inherent in the language. It's an ecosystem thing. If you were us…

I kind of see what you mean :) at my university they announced a python course for developing Computational Fluid Dynamics programs (aerospace engineering), so my first vision of Python wasn't too much for web development but for engineering/scientific programming like fortran is. Although it's a popular choice for web apps. After having worked with fortran I found a bit more attractive Python because of all the indentation and syntax style. I also read that Paul Graham likes a lot more python haha

But many other readings and the fact twitter and groupon were coded in ruby, made the choice! I've read that twitter now is moving to scala, but as there are a lot more resources out there for learning ruby/python, I kicked it out of the list.

I like ruby, sometimes it seems a bit confusing when there are many ways to express the same thing, but it's approach to natural language is helpful.

Thank you all for your quick responses! It's a pleasure to join the HN community!!

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