Paul Rubin>It's at least pretty good. It's not ideal, but nothing ever is.<
I agree. At the moment Python is among the best languages for that, but it's not perfect for that purpose. I think newbies may need a bit more structured language, where you have to put things in a certain order to have a working program. I think this may teach them some good programming habits. Pascal is a bit too much old today, but it helps learn how to program in a tidy way. I am not sure about this, I'd like to have more data to be able to sort out this freedom/structure alternative regarding teaching languages. Another possible downside of Python is that it doesn't allow you to know very well what's under the language, so you can't use pointers and memory very well, so you can't learn those things very well. You need a different language for that, like C (or Pascal) or assembly, but such languages are useful later, and less as very first languages, especially for very young people. Paul Rubin>Chris Okasaki (of functional data structures fame) has an interesting blog post about why indentation-based structuring is a big help for teaching:< I have quite appreciated that article, and other people are doing similar things for C and C++ (I'd like to do something similar for D): http://blog.micropledge.com/2007/09/nobraces/ And OCaml: http://people.csail.mit.edu/mikelin/ocaml+twt/ Arnaud Delobelle>My other 'coming of age' was when I took a lambda- calculus course at university. I felt like a man who's had a black and white TV set all his life and watches colour TV for the first time.< Scheme-like languages are surely interesting, and eventually a programmer can learn one of them, but I think as a very first language Python is fitter, because its syntax is more compatible with a normal little trained human mind. 7stud>Beginning programmers in grades 9-12 are not going to understand issues like that, and it would be a mistake to try and introduce them. Beginning programmers should be concentrating their efforts on learning the syntax of a language and basic constructs like for-loops and if statements.< This is wrong. Some languages like Scheme are quite fit for young people, and they don't even need a for loop. A 7-9 years old person is able to understand quite a lot, and computer science and programming aren't based on syntax. They are more based on the fun of problem solving, and similar things. Syntax is important because it's the tool that allows you to tell the computer how to compute the results of the problems you have (usually) already solved, but it can't be the purpose, even in a first course of programming. When you want to teach painting to a 6 year old child your purpose isn't teaching her/him all about the structure of the canvas and brushes and the chemistry of the pigments, but how to have fun putting all the colors on the canvas/ paper, trying to create some image, for fun. (On the other hand you can teach to love chemistry to a 6-8 year old person, showing how much it can be fun, if you start talking about the chemistry behind the colors of fireworks, but that's not panting anymore). Ben C>Why does Python not have a switch or until statement?< Maybe because it thinks syntax minimalism is a virtue, or maybe because they aren't easy to add (try to design a do-while using Python- like syntax). Ben C>Why are very common objects (stack, queue, linked list) not builtin? etc.< Because it was a small language, used for scripting purposes, I think. You need those data structures if you want higher performance (in speed and/or memory used) but performance was not one of the main purposes of Python. Another purpose for those data structures is to teach them, but a good teaching language is probably one that allows you to write your own versions of them. Today the collections module and other built-in modules gives you some of those data structures, you just need to import them, so using them isn't much a hassle, even if they aren't built in. Aahz>The problem with lambda is that too often it results in clutter< Probably I am missing your point, but I'd like to remind people the syntax for lambdas in the last C# versions: x, y => x * 2 + y Instead of the Python syntax: lambda x, y: x * 2 + y I think that C# syntax is nice and readable enough. Terry Reedy>[lot of things] Yes, fundamentally different categories of types are (sensibly) treated differently with repect to definition and namespace names, but calling that 'disharmony' depends on the listener.< Thank you for your interesting explanation. Bye, bearophile -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
