This cynical view on students is shocking! Everyone on this list has
been a student or a learner for far longer than an educator, and the
perspective from students and learners are far more important than
educators to assess this angle regardless. Can anyone adequately
explain why this specific modality of learning, a student-in-a-seat
based educator, must outweigh all other modalities learners use to
increase knowledge and skill, from the perspectives of policy, tool
creation, and each of our time spent learning?
Shortest story:
Teach not to re-use names.
Short story:
1) What about the full mosaic of learning vs. this myopic view on
seat-based student-educator interaction?
2) What about smart, motivated, diligent and cautious students?
3) What weight should educator opinion be given with respect to
providing convenience to professional Python programmers?
4) Who is this Student Stupid von Densemeister anyways?
5) Are assignment expressions convenience and is any danger the pose
unmitagatble?
6) Consider adding an "Important Topics not Covered" or "Further
Reading" reading section to your class description
7) Creating examples showing this effect is easy, especially when not
actually re-using the name in the expression for explanatory purposes.
it's the same as creating examples showing how re-use works in
comprehensions.
Let's stop constructing these fake Students. They only work as
appeals to the people we have come across whose lack of understanding
has made our life painful. This construction is actively filtering
all the good students for the sake of influencing this decision, yet
again punishing or discounting the intelligent, quick, and diligent.
And what of this underlying premise that educator's should
_significantly_ influence language development? Limiting Python's
tools to Student Straw-man's ability to learn is just dissonant, they
have nothing to do with each other, nor does this cause-effect
relationship actually exist. Let's evaluate this reductionist
statement:
"I understand X, but this other person is not capable of understanding
X, therefore X should not exist" Is has there ever been an X for
which this is true, let alone the backwardation necessary to fully
close the statement?
The actual argument is far less reductionist, yet even more ridiculous:
"I understand X, this other person may take time to learn X, and may
use X wrong, therefore X should not exist"
"I understand assignment expressions, but this other class of person
may take time to learn assignment expressions, and may use assignment
expressions wrong, therefore assignment expressions should not be
accepted"
Rhetorically I disagree with how teaching is being presented, to the
point of near insult (for me lacking a better term). You are saying
these statements about _my_ learning path, (though not personally of
course.) Each of you occupied a role of student at some point, and
each of these statements are being made about your path as well. Do
these ring true of your student experience? What about your much
broader experience as a _learner_? You think a tool shouldn't exist
because it took you time to learn it and you wrote some hard to debug
code, and possibly crashed production, got fired, lost your house and
your pet snake, and crashed the planet into the sun?
Now I yield, I will accept this position: all/some students cannot
learn this (or it's too complex to teach), but they must learn this
during some class to quickly become effective python developers. How
much weight should this position have in this decision? Let's appeal
to the learner in us. How much of our learner's path, percentage of
total time learning all things python related, has been in a seat
listening to someone else, and that's the only place from which we
gained the knowledge to meet the educator's objective? This time
spent in a class, how does that compare to hours in other learning
modalities? Is this percentage not exactly the weight assigned to
that position? Are people hired from pure class-room based experience
expected to require zero further learning? Are people more valuable
based on classroom hours or work hours?
As for handling teaching the subject or not, this is easily remedied
with how I do it: "Important Topics not Covered", with resources.
Anyone here can rightfully claim educator status by having taught
another person something related to this language, which includes
at-work mentoring, informal discussions, posting/replying on SO,
blogging, etc. Are they not being solicited to comment as well? It's
possible to answer this question while vehemently disagreeing with the
PEP. This focus on people who are being ostensibly paid to teach is
myopic.
Concretely, it's clear to me that parent-local effects can be
dangerously non-obvious when reading and mimicking code without
undertsanding. But when? And how to guard against? How about this:
teach proper (i.e. not) re-using names. The name will still be
