On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 12:47 PM, Noufal Ibrahim <nou...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 12:32 PM, Venkatraman S <venka...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I would recommend starting with http://alpha.djangogenerator.com/ to get > a > > feel of an 'application'. > > It might be just me but I think this is an *extremely* bad idea. > > I just tried the site and it looks like a nice point and click wizard > to create an "application template" which people can customise into > an application. > > The world has enough people who consider programming mostly a matter > of point and click who don't know what's going on. I would be > completely against using any of these tools for an introductory > programming course. I'd teach language basics, the standard library > (like Senthil pointed out) so that they don't reinvent the wheel > poorly and then have them solve *hard* problems which are relevant to > their area of work. Getting an application up and running with a few > clicks of a mouse has the same effect as eating junk food. Your > appetite goes away, you can claim that you've eaten something but > there's close to zero nourishment. > The point is : the audience is MBA students. And i have had experience coaching around 40+students who had ZERO experience with programing and taught them Python. They were HIGHLY skeptical to program. I had to really motivate them a lot to get them onto Python. I partly succeeded. Now the entire org, which was using Java, runs on Python. Do NOT expect MBA grads to *program* - they are decision makers, they need language as a *tool* to augment their daily work - hence Macros. I can include some verbiage here reg the MBA mentality in India et al. but thats cliched! DjangoGenerator is cool to understand what an 'application'-'relation' looks like. I have been using this to get 2 persons to understand the concept of a 'web application'. This tool is not a 'pseudo' programmer. Will you stop using Pinax for the same reasons? -V _______________________________________________ BangPypers mailing list BangPypers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers
