On Nov 20, 10:20 am, Aaron Watters <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Nov 19, 1:41 am, MonkeeSage <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On the other hand, C# and .NET seems like a lot of baggage to bring to > > the table. First off, you have to introduce the CLR and how it relates > > to C#, then you have to deal with all the public, private, etc, > > syntaxis for constructors/destructors. I don't see how anyone could > > claim that C# is simpler to teach than python. I mean, (non-PC > > statement follows), it's easier to teach retarded, blind children to > > recite the lord's prayer backwards, in sign language, than it is to > > get a working .net environment set up for actual use w/o installing > > the latest visual studio. And not everyone had five-million dollars > > (or a corporate license) to get the latest and greatest VS. > > You've got some good points that are not > necessarily the case any more. The free > version of Visual Studio from MSFT installs > with no problems as far as I can tell, > especially on recent Windows OS's. The > extra complexity of "static public void Main()..." > &c is scary and confusing, but you can just tell > the students to "ignore that stuff for now." > You don't have to talk about the CLR at all; > the students naturally take it for granted. > In VS when you start typing something, > VS makes a pretty good guess what you are > trying to do and offers to complete it for you > -- which would be really nice to have in > Python (and unavailable afaik, at least at > that level of sophistication). When you make > a syntax or type error you get a red squiggly > underline, and so forth. > FWIW it's trivial to run pyflakes on your code (automatically behind the scenes) to get syntax checking; in vim, my syntax errors get underlined immediately for python code. It's especially nice for large web applications, where having to go reload a page only to discover you typed "if a=1:" or some silliness actually takes some amount of time.
I also get function prototypes on the status line (so, e.g., the elsethread example of confusing list.extend and list.append is mitigated to a large degree). Dynamic typing loses some info, but you can get most of the big benefits with it. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
