kirby urner wrote: > I would like a deeper discussion of why we still need to prompt > ourselves for input. > > I think the model today is "a person writing code for him or herself" > i.e. "self as client" -- at least in an early context. We're not > guiding the unknowing through a menu tree. We're computer literate, > fluent. > > Why would we ask ourselves for raw_input, when it's much easier to > just pass arguments to functions?
When I think back to when I was learning to program in 9th grade (I'm not a professional software devel) I know that it was really exciting to be able to twiddle with the computer for a bit, then call my mom over and have her work with my program -- simple guessing games, then eventually moving on to more sophisitcated things like memory, card games, etc. At the time I was learning QBasic, so console-oriented input was what you had. Granted QBasic had no notion of an interactive console -- or rather it did, but that was not a predominant way of interacting with it. But even though it did, it would not have been as exciting to sit my mom down with it and let her play around, and I wouldn't want to have to explain to her (even now with a nearly infinitely more sophisticated understanding of computers and programming than I did in my first months) what a function is, how to interact with it, what arguments are, etc. It may not be how you like to teach computer programming or interacting with computers, but I think there's a very important case to be made for "other as client" at the very beginning, as a way of keeping it interesting, when someone else is going to see it. > If you're *really* coding for a complete newbie, then learn GUI > programming, meet them where they want to be met. Otherwise, just > import and use a namespace, like a real grownup. All this "ask myself > for degrees centigrade" stuff is just too 1970s, too BASIC (yech!). I don't think programming with, eg, raw_input() is programming for a newbie, but it is programming *at the level of a newbie* for someone else who may or may not be -- in my mom's case, sure, if I had made a GUI that might have been easier for her. but the goal was not to make a program for her, the goal was to make a program, and having someone else who could use it was a really powerful motivator that got me to explore ways to extend it beyond the beginning code that was assigned by my teacher. - d _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig