<rant> Count me a skeptic that there's anything unattractive about Python that's to blame for keeping it from wider use in school systems.
Once you go down that road, of soliciting off-the-cuff feedback, you'll get endless nonsense about making it case insensitive, adding a "schoolish math" division symbol, or in general making it more like Mathematica, meaning superscripts, subscripts... and voila, no more Python (I call it the disappearing snake trick). I prefer counter-carping about those ugly computer-illiterate notations, a typographer's nightmare (or job security depending how you look at it): over-indulgence in single-symbol expressions; obsession with lambda, sigma -- too clever by half, a way to obfuscate, not friendly to children (deliberately -- going for that imposing, austere look, trying to intimidate (very Springer-Verlag, the opposite of O'Reilly's far friendlier 'Head First' series)). Why many smart geeks drop pre- or even anti-computer "schoolish math" like a hot potato is they realize it: (a) doesn't execute (i.e. is dead on arrival, DOA) and (b) is designed to pump up egos at the expense of readability, nothing so sane as the Zen of Python at work. </rant> Kirby On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 9:34 AM, Andre Roberge <andre.robe...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 10:06 AM, Jurgis Pralgauskis > <jurgis.pralgaus...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Hello, >> >> it would make python more attractive, >> if there would be possibility to try it online >> like ruby has http://tryruby.hobix.com >> >> maybe this could be made with jython , http://code.google.com/p/epy/ >> or crunchy on GAE _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
