sprad a écrit : > I'm a high school computer teacher, and I'm starting a series of > programming courses next year (disguised as "game development" classes > to capture more interest). The first year will be a gentle > introduction to programming, leading to two more years of advanced > topics. > > I was initially thinking about doing the first year in Flash/ > ActionScript, and the later years in Java. My reasoning is that Flash > has the advantage of giving a quick payoff to keep the students > interested while I sneak in some OOP concepts through ActionScript. > Once they've gotten a decent grounding there, they move on to Java for > some more heavy-duty programming. > > I've never used Python, but I keep hearing enough good stuff about it > to make me curious. > > So -- would Python be a good fit for these classes?
IMHO, yes, definitively - except that it won't introduce concepts like static typing and primitive types, since it's dynamically typed and 100% object. OTHO, it'll let you introduce quite a lot of more advanced topics (operator overloading, metaclasses, higher-order functions, closures, partial application etc) that you're less likely to grasp using Java. > Could it equal > Java as the later heavy-duty language? If you mean "is it possible to use Python to write real-world, non-trivial applications", then the answer is obviously yes. Python's use range from Q&D admin script to full-blown web application server including vector graphic GUI apps, scientific data analysis and plotting and game developpment and/or scripting. > Does it have enough quickly- > accessible sparklies to unseat Flash? Since you plan to lure poor schoolboys in by pretending to teach them game programming, you may want to have a look at pygame: http://www.pygame.org/news.html > I want to believe. Evangelize away. "Then I saw Pygame, now I'm a believer".... !-) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
