A friend of mine is an engineer and he's been needing to do more and more programming as he goes on with is career. I convinced him to learn Python instead of Perl and he's really started to like it. He usually comes to me when he can't accomplish a task with his current knowledge and I introduce him to a new feature in Python. FYIW, he thought List Comprehensions were freakin' awesome. He's started writing his own personal scripts for tasks like web scraping. So, from personal experience, Python truly is a great first language to learn.
Although his learning experience has gone mostly smoothly, he's hit a lot of speed bumps with functions. Specifically, he's having trouble thinking of functions as first order data (don't worry, I haven't confused him with such terminology yet). He had a little trouble understanding that you can pass functions as arguments to other functions (e.g., passing a key to the list.sort method). He also had a little trouble grasping functions within other functions. Last but not least, he had trouble grasping methods in class declarations, especially the required self as the first argument (I'm sure he wasn't the first). Now, my friend's a smart guy so I know it isn't any lack of brain cells on his part. I still remember many students in my CS classes having trouble grasping the very same concept. And, after we finally get a hold of first order functions, we appreciate its incorporation into languages. It would be a shame if my friend just learns the motions and never incorporates first order functions into his programs. I began to wonder if there was anything Python could do to help newcomers grasp the power of first order functions or, as Pythonistas put it, everything is an object. To me, the biggest setback for new programmers is the different syntax Python has for creating functions. Instead of the common (and easy to grasp) syntax of foo = bar Python has the def foo(): syntax. So, when a new programmer is first introduced to functions they are immediately confronted with the notion that functions are "different". After all, they have their own special syntax. This seems to only further the separation newbies make between "data" and "functions" or "stuff" and "actions". Now, the vast majority of us learned this dichotomy when we first began to program, so we are ingrained to assume and even expect a different syntax for function declaration, but in a program like Python there doesn't seem to be any other reason to have it. Furthermore, I think it actually inhibits the learning of the uninitiated. We can, of course, keep the current syntax as sugar. To someone who's learning to program wouldn't a syntax like the further give them all they need and also reinforces the idea that functions are data just like everything else? my_function = function(foo, bar): pass an_instance_method = function(self, foo): pass a_method_declaration = method(self, foo): pass The last one is mostly my pet peeve of having Python "magically" create methods out of (what is essentially) a function declaration. When I first learned it, it felt wrong but you had to press through it because there was really no other way of declaring methods. What do you think? Have you hit this roadblock when helping others learn Python? Does the current syntax make you feel that functions are still treated as second class (get it?) citizens? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
