On Fri, 21 Sep 2007 21:37:18 +0000, Cristian wrote: > 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).
First of all, let me say that I think "functions as first class data" is helpful, but not crucial, to programming in Python, and there are many people who simply don't need the lesson. Especially someone like an engineer (in the classical sense), who isn't building versatile software packages, won't need to resort to functional programming much. For straightforward tasks, like sorting lists with a custom ordering, functional progamming merely a convenience, and can be done without. So I'm -1 on syntactic changes to the language to support a pedagogical use that's not crucially important. Now, as for the more general question--How do you teach functional concepts?--because some people do need to know it. I suspect it's one of those things where there are two possibilities and not much in between. Either 1. The person gets it right away. or 2. The person doesn't get it right away. In the latter case, trying to teach it conceptually is probably hopeless. Best thing to do is teach functional usage for certain use cases. For instance, teach someone to define a function returning a key, and have them use "key=myfunc" in list.sort--and not worry about why it works. If they keep at it, eventually one of two things will happen. Either, 2a. The person will have an "A ha! I get it now!" moment, and will finally understand the concept. or 2b. The person will never get it. Carl Banks -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
