I believe Damian Conway thinks P6 would be a very good CS teaching language.
On 1/19/16, Tom Browder <tom.brow...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 10:18 AM, Steve Mynott <steve.myn...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> I think targeting Perl 6 at CS academic teachers is an excellent idea >> as a way of generally promoting use of the language. >> >> But I'd be wary of "bashing" current choices such as Python and don't >> believe any objective comparison of the two languages is possible. >> >> Python is in any case derived from ABC which was explicitly designed >> for teaching purposes. > > I'm not suggesting bashing Python, Steve, I just think some comparison > is necessary. > > The article I am referencing is this: > > Python for Beginners > _______________________________ > By Esther Shein > Communications of the ACM, Vol. 58 No. 3, Pages 19-21 > 10.1145/2716560 > > Here is an excerpt detailing some criticisms of Python as a teaching > language > > <quote> > Not everyone agrees Python is the be-all-end-all as an introductory > programming language. Shriram Krishnamurthi, a professor of computer > science at Brown University, acknowledges Python has many nice > features. "It offers a pleasant syntax, a large set of libraries, and > an interaction loop ... all of which are very useful for teaching. > Compared to the noise and complexity of Java, it is indeed a very nice > step forward." He agrees Python has made people feel more comfortable > about exposing programming to a much broader audience of students. > > "There are many students I would not dream of teaching Java to that I > would happily show Python." That said, however, it does not take long > to discover Python's weaknesses, Krishnamurthi notes. Among them are > that "Creating non-trivial data structures is onerous, because Python > does not provide straightforward means for creating new structured > data. You have to understand a bunch of unrelated concepts, like > classes, and their onerous syntax and tricky semantics, which greatly > reduces the benefit of simplicity that Python was supposed to offer." > > Because of this, he believes more and more curricula are ditching the > idea of structured data—one of the central concepts in computer > science—and doing one of two things: shaping their curriculum to avoid > them, or pushing students to encode more-structured data in > less-structured formats provided by default in Python. > > "This lack of data structuring and classification has a significant > negative impact on teaching program design," Krishnamurthi says. "The > best program design methods we have right now focus on data-driven > design, which derive from the structure of data." > </quote> > > Best, > > -Tom >
