On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 11:11:04 PM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > On Mon, 27 Jul 2015 01:59 am, Rustom Mody wrote: > > > Its 2015 now and any ½ decent teacher of programming, writes programs in > > front of the class. > > Yeah, but the fully decent teachers prepare before hand, so the students > don't have to wait while they type out the (buggy) program in front of > them. > > *half a smiley* > > > > And debugs and hacks and pokes around OS-related stuff > > (ps, top and more arcane) etc. > > And you do that in Emacs instead of the shell? > > Or IPython? > > > > [Yeah I did hear complaints about an OS teacher who puts up PPTs and reads > > [them out. So the set < ½-decent is not empty I guess] > > Did the students really complain "Teacher X came to class prepared with code > already written"? Or was the complaint about the technology used? Or > something else? > > I really don't know how I feel about this. I did maths and physics at uni, > and it seems natural for the lecturer to work through the mathematics in > front of you. I also did computer science, and it feels completely natural > for the lecturer to hand out notes with the code already written. (These > days, I suppose, you would use slides, or give them a URL and tell them to > download the code.) Except for the most trivial interactive examples in the > Python REPR, I can't imagine why anyone would want to watch the lecturer > type the code out in front of them. > > I can think of one exception... watching somebody go through the iterative > process of debugging code. > > > > So while emacs makes everything else look rather puerile, setting it up > > is such a bitch that last python course I just switched to idle. > > Must admit it was more pleasant than I expected. > > Except that sometimes we need C and C++ and assembly and haskell and make > > and config files and git commits and... > > And so emacs (or eclipse!!) remains the only option > > Um... your students are probably using Macs, Windows, and a small minority > with Linux, yes? On laptops? > > Your Linux students are probably fine. Some of them probably know more than > you :-) > > Mac users have access to a full BSB environment, even if most of them don't > know it. > > Your Windows users are the problem.
Pretty much. ½ Linux ½ Windows, 1 mac Tried to get everyone onto linux. Most did. Some failed to install it. [I actually called these stragglers for one special ubuntu-setup session. Didn't happen for some silly reasons] So I couldn't dictate linux, just 'suggest' it :-) Policy-wise: College provides machines (supposedly) setup Practically: If one relies on that, the hours the students spend with these will end up being ¼ what they would spend on their own laptops > You could try GnuWin and Gnu Core > Utilities for a set of GNU tools for Windows. You could build a bootable > USB stick containing the Linux installation of your choice, and get them to > use that. (Of course, I can imagine your school/university having a > conniption fit at the thought of the liability issues if the software > erased somebody's hard drive...) > > Things were much better in my day. Nobody expected the students to have > access to a computer at home. You used a dumb workstation to log into a VAX > running Unix, and used the tools the uni supplied, or a standalone Mac 512K > (if you were lucky) or Mac 128K (if you weren't), and again, you used the > tools they supplied. > > > > -- > Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
