Hello Atanas, I agree with this post 100%. GUIs require a fairly good understanding of event loops and OOP. They confuse beginners who have to look at the code as well as the pictures. They are, however, a good example of quality OO design, once the students have a little experience.
Thursday, June 2, 2005, 7:42:34 PM, you wrote: >> -----Original Message----- >> Behalf Of Bob Noonan >> The one place where Python is clearly deficient IMHO is in GUI RA> programming. RA> While this might be true, I do not feel it is a problem. The problem is RA> that GUI programming is given significant coverage in most mainstream RA> introductory CS textbooks. Open an arbitrary Java-based textbook and you RA> are likely to face GUIs from almost the beginning. Sample programs and RA> exercises often come with GUI shells that obscure their essential RA> non-GUI parts. I find the dominance of GUIs in java-based introductory RA> books troublesome. RA> GUI programming is relatively complex. To understand it, one needs to RA> understand event handling. I have hard time explaining event handling to RA> beginners and see that beginners have hard time understanding it. While RA> GUI programming is complex from beginner's perspective, it does not RA> offer many interesting algorithmic problems. RA> I believe that we humans are really good at linear communication. Most RA> animals see and understand pictures. We humans have the exclusive RA> capability of speaking and hearing *linear sequences* of sounds, while RA> animals are not particularly good at that. We are also good in reading RA> and writing sequences of characters while no known animals can do that. RA> Some folks say that a picture can easily show what a thousand words RA> cannot. Well, there is nothing you cannot express with words, but there RA> are many things that you cannot express, at least not easily, with RA> pictures. You do not need to try translating Shakespeare into pictures RA> to see how hard that would be, just try writing technical emails in this RA> list using pictures. RA> My point is that GUI should not be overweighed in intro CS courses. GUIs RA> have some place, but certainly not central place in such courses. RA> Python's interactive mode, without GUIs, is great way to teach RA> introductory level programming. Therefore, a possible Python deficiency RA> in the GUI area should not be considered a problem at all. RA> I apologize for this non-technical message. I was tempted to write it RA> because I have struggled way too much teaching too much GUI programming RA> in intro level CS courses. RA> Atanas RA> Atanas Radenski RA> mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.chapman.edu/~radenski/ RA> _______________________________________________ RA> Edu-sig mailing list RA> [email protected] RA> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig -- Best regards, Chuck _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
