On Mon, 2006-09-04 at 21:36 -0500, John Zelle wrote: > It may not be on that scale, but it would certainly cause me to survey the > language landscape again to see if there are better languages for teaching.
On Tue, 2006-09-05 at 09:45 -0500, Peter Chase wrote: > If you want to expose your students to the full horror of a > syntactically complete language, why not switch to C++, where you can > run programs in the compiler? On Tue, 2006-09-05 at 09:54 -0500, Brad Miller wrote: > Its hard to say for sure, but if I had seen that in order to get > user > input I had to import sys and explain to students who are seeing > their first programming language what sys.stdin was all about.... I > don't think I would have explored Python much further. > > On Tue, 2006-09-05 at 09:50 -0700, Radenski, Atanas wrote: > Me too :-) I would like to see both input and raw_input preserved. > Replacing these with more complicated (from pedagogical perspective) > methods would probably give an additional reason for educators to look > at alternative languages, such as Ruby. * Being dispassionate on the issue itself - I have *never* used raw_input() and, as it happens, I am generally literate enough at this point so that the intentions of sys.stdin.readline is *clearer* to me than is raw_input() - I am disturbed by the tone of the discussion. Guess I prefer the all-in-the-family temper tantrum, then the calm and dispassionate threat - explicit or implicit. I guess I view it also as an example of the result of Python promoting itself to the educational community in the wrong way, and on the wrong footing, from day one - as the easy alternative, rather then as the literate and productive alternative, the *best* alternative for getting a certain class of problems solved in the least circuitous way. In particular, the kinds of real world problems a student might want to solve or explore. Since sys.stdin.readline seems to me *more* literate, I'm OK with it. And will maintain my apparently cloistered, unreal world view of how a motivated student might want most to be approached, and her fragility. Art _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
