On Tuesday 07 March 2006 04:44 pm, Rich wrote: > Anyway, my question is: what experience you people have with working > with different languages at the same time?
Invariably, you will occasionally confuse one with the other, which is a penalty you already know, I'm sure. OTOH, it will reduce your bias towards the limitations of one language over another. I've been trying to get my kids to learn a little Python for some time, but it hasn't been too easy for them yet. Then, out of the blue, they want to learn Lua. Why? Simple -- Lua is the extension language for Enigma. So they want to make new game levels ergo, they must use Lua. Motivation matters more than ease, IMHO. :-) We realized recently that while teaching kids to program is hard, teaching them to *hack* is easy. Once they learn to hack game levels, they will learn, from the level designers, basics about scripting and then programming, and they'll start to ask "how can I make this easier?" Already, my son asked "is there any way I don't have to type this line over and over again?" So we learned loops that day. It is SO much easier to teach a concept when the student is actively trying to find out, instead of trying to push the idea on them and come up with justification for why they need to know it. This way he already knows the problem -- I just have to provide the solution. But I don't think I want to try to go full-force into Lua. In some ways it's similar to Python, but lighter-weight. OTOH, I don't think I'd want to try to make anything serious with it. Nevertheless, I find that it's easier to teach them Python at the same time as they learn Lua. Concepts are similar, and it's not really that hard to go back and forth. I'm going to continue developing basic concepts in Lua (embedded in Enigma), and then work with Python and PyGame to get them making their own programs from scratch using the concepts they learn through hacking (a project we've been interested in for some time -- my kids have been making sprites for a future game for a long time now and are getting pretty good at that part). So, I don't think you'll have a real problem with it. Cheers, Terry -- Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com ) Anansi Spaceworks http://www.anansispaceworks.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
