Retiring Python as a Teaching Language

Post by olavk » Wed, Jan 21, 2015, 9:26 AM UTC

oskarth wrote: post #135

bjourne wrote: post #120

I'm saddened by the lack of academic rigour displayed in this thread. If you have not taught introductory computer science courses, then you have NO CLUE what makes a good introductory language choice. It appears James Hague isn't working as a teacher either, just giving advice to newbies, so his opinion is just that -- opinion. What you want is field studies: "This year we used Haskell and 75% of all students gave u…

> What you want is field studies: "This year we used Haskell and 75% of all students gave up on programming stating that it was to hard. Last year we used Visual Basic and only 20% did. Ergo Visual Basic is probably a better first language than Haskell." Why is that necessarily a good thing? What are we optimizing for here, understanding or popularity? SICP review by Peter Norvig: > Donald Knuth says he wrote his boo…

Post by yodsanklai » Wed, Jan 21, 2015, 9:34 AM UTC

fchollet wrote: post #114

johnloeber wrote: post #85

When I took an introduction to Computer Science in college, it was taught in Racket. Over winter break, I then learned Python, and I was baffled -- why would any curriculum not start with Python? Python was easy, expressive, and allowed the user to get lots done with little effort. It was great at motivating programming by showing its use and power. It seemed like an ideal introductory language. Over the last few yea…

Teaching is made of two components: access to knowledge, and motivation. Today, access to knowledge is almost entirely irrelevant: pretty much all knowledge is freely accessible from anywhere, anytime. You just need the motivation to look it up. Teaching yourself can be easy, if only you have the drive to keep at it. It wasn't the case in our past. In the middle ages, before the printing press, teaching was 99% passi…

Post by dagw » Wed, Jan 21, 2015, 9:42 AM UTC

oskarth wrote: post #135

bjourne wrote: post #120

I'm saddened by the lack of academic rigour displayed in this thread. If you have not taught introductory computer science courses, then you have NO CLUE what makes a good introductory language choice. It appears James Hague isn't working as a teacher either, just giving advice to newbies, so his opinion is just that -- opinion. What you want is field studies: "This year we used Haskell and 75% of all students gave u…

> What you want is field studies: "This year we used Haskell and 75% of all students gave up on programming stating that it was to hard. Last year we used Visual Basic and only 20% did. Ergo Visual Basic is probably a better first language than Haskell." Why is that necessarily a good thing? What are we optimizing for here, understanding or popularity? SICP review by Peter Norvig: > Donald Knuth says he wrote his boo…

Post by flohofwoe » Wed, Jan 21, 2015, 9:58 AM UTC

flohofwoe wrote: post #156

If the main focus of the class is to code games for smart phones the choice should be the Unity Engine. BUT that would be the entirely wrong choice to learn programming. Games are multi-discipline projects, programming is just a small part of it, there are many distractions when writing a game to get graphics, sound, AI 'look and sound right', and the visual 'rapid prototyping' workflow of modern game engines gives y…

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Jan 21, 2015, 10:12 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #65

Udo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, that's a personal preference, not a statement of fact. There is a cost associated with different type systems, and that cost can vary with the problem you are trying to solve. It's not that I argue against the benefits of having such a system in place, but you should be aware of the fact that this too might not represent the end-all-be-all for all programmers. One of the basic mistakes made here seems to be th…

Again, this is not about personal preference. In the real world, 90% of programmers use either C#, Java, C/C++, JS or Python/Ruby/Perl in their jobs. We could restrict ourselves to this set of languages and syntax style, and design a super-set language that does everything, gets rid of their historical warts, and can go from scripting to HPC. Stuff like using significant whitespace or not, are BS bikeshedding, which…