At 11:39 AM 1/25/2010, David MacQuigg wrote:
Is there anything in the current AP test that can't be translated to Python?
Of course not. But AP is driven by colleges. The AP exam used to be in C++ until 2003. The current exam has heavy emphasis on OOP. It took a tremendous effort to retrain HS teachers from C++ to Java/OOP... If the college board decided that Python is used at most colleges in intro CS courses, they would eventually move. This is very unlikely, though. College courses are getting more and more fragmented in terms of the languages used, so it might be easier for the college board to move to a language-less exam. The current exam is too Java specific.
Comparing the raw scores might lead to a real awakening.
Scores depend a lot on a particular teacher and textbook, not so much on the language. The remaining AP CS exam is not very demanding, anyway, in terms of writing code that works.
Bruce Eckel (Thinking in Java) says he is five times more productive in Python than in Java. I hesitate to use that number, because people will think I am crazy. I am comfortable saying a factor of two, however.
Me too -- by a factor of two. At least. So what? First language discussions flare up regularly on the ap-compsci listserve. In this forum, Python would win, of course. :) I am all for Python, but I don't believe in the "objects first" approach. The College Board's CS Development Committee seems to be gradually moving away from heavy duty OOP back to algorithms.
Gary Litvin www.skylit.com _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
