I'm continuing to advance the notion, in Medium comments and elsewhere, that learning one computer language at a time may be less efficient than tackling two or more, but with a "main one" front burner. [1]
I credit the LEX Institute for this idea.[2] The theory being: contrasts and comparisons help concepts stick, whereas just one example (of a language, human or computer) provides less traction, a slipperier slope. Like learning the J language (jsoftware.com) even a little helps one realize how different languages can be, bringing Python into sharper relief against a background. But J (of APL heritage) might be too exotic as a #2, why not do JavaScript? Python + JS could be as common as HTML + CSS. That's a little self serving as a common bootcamp design if JS front end, Python back end. Our PDX Code Guild in Portland takes that tack. The curriculum, then, would continually bring them together to discuss their similarities and differences. Either one could be foreground first, with the other as background, but we'd do a lot of jumping back and forth (and not just with JSON :-D). A breakthrough realization I had earlier today was that Jupyter Notebooks already gives me a JavaScript interpreter, even when my main kernel is Python 3. %%javascript at the top of any cell creates a node-like experience, and I'm able to write ES6 (JavaScript) with classes, arrow functions and everything. It feels a lot like using node --harmony testfile.js on cloud9 (another learning platform I visit). Here's an example, of a Jupyter Notebook running through nbviewer, with both Python and JS code cells. The point is to show off the similarities. https://goo.gl/nj9RPO Kirby Useful tools: http://codepen.io/ http://jsbin.com/ [1] https://goo.gl/U4Yx6l (comment on one of Quincy Larson's, about which language to learn first) [2] 'Who Is Fourier?' (one of its pubs) appears way back in edu-sig. Jason Cunliff and I met and talked about it in New York that time. Here's one of Jason's from 2002: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/2002-September/002255.html
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