Nir Soffer wrote: > Its a nice article and relevant to people who know to program in other > languages - but in this case it is NOT relevant, as the students don't > have any background in other languages. For those students, unless > they know some other language, the Python way is the only way :-). > They will find this article useful later when they learn their second > language.
On the contrary - it might be even more relevant for first language course. Note that it is addressed to the lecturer, not the students. Since many teachers have the wrong concept of python variables, they tend to "spoil" the students: * They waste time on useless definitions of what a "variable" is (students already *know* what a name is, so it takes only a few words), the only result of which is confusing them. * They explain python statements and examples using misleading terms: e.g. read "a=3" as "store the value 3 in the variable a" (instead of "bind the name a to the object 3") - no wonder the student would expect the previous "value" to be overriden. This, of course, is a theory. The relevant fact is that I've seen people that learned python as first language do similiar bugs to those mentioned in the article. p.s. - note that the "variables" misconception is closely related to the "weakly typed" nonesense you hear from many people (there's a short mention of it in the article, but maybe I should write a seperate mini-article about it too).
