Kirby,
Thank you for your kind words.
Andrew has just signed a book deal to be delivered in about a year's
time. His task: to write about what it's like to learn to code. We're
regularly in touch via email, he's "up for it" (as we say in Britain)
and sponge-like in his desire to learn about coding, Python and the
culture that surrounds it. He's also looking at other languages too
(perhaps C/C++).
My hope is he'll demolish some of the toxic and exclusory stereotypes
and behaviours associated with coding. I hope he'll celebrate some of
the progress we, in the Python community, have worked so hard to bring
about in this respect. I hope he'll hold us to account as "the fifth
estate", as he calls us in the Economist piece. He gets that coding is
both moral and political in nature.
He's clever, funny and writes extraordinarily clear and witty prose. He
tells a great story too (I've read both his other books). I'm looking
forward to reading what he has to say.
Best wishes,
N.
On 02/06/18 21:13, kirby urner wrote:
One of my screen scraper friends (always reading) just forwarded this link:
https://www.1843magazine.com/features/code-to-joy
A highly literate middle aged writer tackles programming from zero and
winds up in Python after a pilgrimmage through Javascript, and uses the
Twitter API. He meditates on what learning to code might mean to a
fully developed adult such as himself (connects to Andragogy **).
Nicholas Tollervey, sometime edu-sig poster and Micro:bit avatar, is
very much a hero in this story, living up to the ideal of a Pythonista as
(A) not religiously dogmatic (re "language wars") yet
(B) having enthusiasm for sharing Python (without too much proselytizing).
Bravo on a stellar performance!
Quincy Larson of freeCodeCamp fame is another champion of openness and
accessibility (and good advice). I get his emails in my inbox with
gratitude, though I don't follow all the links (helpfully labeled with
estimated reading times, for my internal scheduler -- thanks for the
meta-data!).
In the interests of sparking some edu-sig type discussion (this could
fork to a new thread), the author Andrew Smith writes:
"Variables are best (if imperfectly) understood as the vessels within
which pieces of data are contained, ready to be worked on. Of many
possible data types, the most straightforward are numbers and strings,
string being the name given to text."
In my classes I readily acknowledge the "variable as container" metaphor
is apt, and agree that Python objects take up memory and so object ==
container (with id) is OK too.
However, the name --> object mapping of a namespace is better imagined
as "luggage tag -> suitcase" relationship. It's not like the Python name
itself is the container on the heap.
The object in memory is a possibly fat heavy suitcase, stuffed with
stuff (e.g. an HttpResponse). However the name is more a label, like a
luggage tag on a suitcase (and this is the point).
Name : Object :: Luggage Tags :: Suitcase
One suitcase (object) may have many names (connects to garbage
collection discussion). However at any one moment, a name points to
only one object (the same name in different modules, both running, still
count as different names -- scope matters).
So yeah, the object itself is a "container" but what it contains may be
tags to other objects.
Without this separation of "names" from "objects" there's an inevitable
tendency to imagine copies, as how can we have two bowls or boxes with
exactly the same content.
We don't have a visual metaphor for "two suitcases containing exactly
the same clothes at the same time".
But we do understand "one suitcase having two or more luggage tags."
Surely we have two copies, albeit clones of the same thing. Not so in
Python though. Python is biased against making gratuitous copies of
anything. Keep is spare! (sparse if possible). Don't clutter memory
with excessive redundancy.
Kirby
**
http://4dsolutions.net/presentations/pycon2013.pdf
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