Russel Winder: > Uuuurrr... this is just wrong on so many levels. To avoid writing an > 10,000 word essay, I'll just stick to: Python and Groovy have proven to > be excellent languages for teaching first year undergraduates and > adults.
I have chosen Python to teach programming at new university students that know nearly nothing about programming. I think Python is among the best languages currently available to teach programming (Python partially comes from ABC, a language mostly designed for teaching), but it's far from perfect still for this purpose: - I appreciate Python significant indentation a lot, but I've seen it cause problems to some students. - Dynamic typing is handy, but it makes it a bit harder to learn the discipline of types. - Confusing variable creation and variable update is not good to teach programming to newbies and causes problems. - Many programming newbies are blind to the diffences in case, for them FOR and for are the same word, so a case agnostic language as Pascal is may be better for such people. - The lack of built-in rationals doesn't help. - Lazy computations, introduced since some years in Python are a useful and powerful tool, but for a newbie it's one more complexity to learn and manage. - All variables managed by reference (by name) is good for uniformity (and efficiency!), but it also introduces some complexities and bugs that newbies don't like a lot. - Python doesn't support recursion in a good enough way. - Python error messages and debugging is far from the best. If you take a look at the IDE of Racket Scheme you see something far more newbie-friendly. Note: your posts come out empty through the web interface: http://www.digitalmars.com/webnews/newsgroups.php?art_group=digitalmars.D.announce&article_id=20572 Bye, bearophile
