I used to teach functions before loops, but then there wasn't anything
useful to put in the functions :-)
On 2015-12-03 9:37 AM, Juan Nunez-Iglesias wrote:
I had trouble with this at our recent workshop in Adelaide. My current
thinking is that we should introduce for loops *after* functions so
that we can do something like:
def do_something_useful_to_image(input_image):
...
for each_image in all_images_in_directory:
processed_image = do_something_useful_to_image(each_image)
save(processed_image)
Obviously I need to work on the output part, so that we can save the
effect of the loop but not use things like modifying lists in-place,
which was also confusing to some. But my general idea is to get the
for-loop reading as close to an Engish sentence as possible. Despite
Python's strengths, this is difficult to do with builtins.
Juan.
On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 8:24 PM, Karin Lagesen <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
The more I teach, the more I realize that I am not really able to
convey what a for loop does to everybody. Do any of you have a
metaphor or something that you use for teaching it? I explain
about variables and collections, and the body of the loop, and I
show examples, but I am still not able to get through all the time.
Karin
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Software Carpentry | http://software-carpentry.org
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