Am 23.05.2011 21:53, schrieb bearophile:
> Daniel Gibson:
>
>>> - I appreciate Python significant indentation a lot, but I've seen it cause
>>> problems to some students.
>>
>> What kind of problems? (related to tabs vs spaces?)
>
> Tabs Vs spaces is not a big problem once you have told students to set up all
> their editors to never emit a tab :-) So this is not the real problem.
> Different people have very different brains, some people find easy certain
> things and other people find easy other things. A good teacher must adapt
> himself/herself/hirself to the brain of the different students. Significant
> indentation has some good advantages, it reduces noise, it makes the
> semantics of the code the same of what you see, etc. But some programming
> newbies just aren't precise enough, they lose control and count of
> indentations, etc. For them spaces are nothing, they don't even see them, so
> for them braces are probably better, despite the increase in noise.
>
OTOH python teaches to indent your code properly which enhances
readability, so maybe it's a good thing to learn right from the beginning.
I've had students producing working code (Java and SQL) that was totally
unreadable because it wasn't indented properly.
>
>>> - Dynamic typing is handy, but it makes it a bit harder to learn the
>>> discipline of types.
>>
>> Yeah, I personally don't like dynamic typing at all.
>
> We are discussing about a language used as first programming language. What's
> good for an programmer that is programming since two years is sometimes not
> the best for a newbie and vice versa too. Finding a good balance for newbies
> between Pascal/Java-style boring and stupid static typing, full type
> inference as in ML, and full dynamic typing as in Python, is not easy.
>
>
>> I strongly disagree. The first language they learn should *not* be
>> agnostic to case, so they learn that case matters (because it does in
>> most languages).
>
> Most languages are strict in their case. So sooner or later a programmer must
> learn to tell apart cases of keywords and variables.
Exactly. So why teach it in a differently first and then tell "well, now
you're using a proper language and now you have to start caring about
case"? This just asks for subtle bugs because of spelling mistakes..
class Bar {
int p;
void setFoo(int P) { this.p = p; }
}
and stuff like that.
> But the case of keywords is _not_ essential to learn the basics of
> programming. There are so many things to learn in the beginning. And Pascal
> has being used to successfully teach generations of programmers. So while I
> respect your point of view, I think this is something different teachers are
> allowed to disagree on :-)
>
It may not be essential. Neither is correct spelling; so the language
could be fuzzy about detecting keywords so "to { ... } wihle(...);"
could be accepted as well :-P
Also: What are "the basics or programming"? Isn't expressing what you
want in a precise way part of it? And caring about case is part of being
precise IMHO.
> Bye,
> bearophile
Cheers,
- Daniel
