This has gotten a bit OT..
Is there’s mailing list or something for folks to discuss the teaching of
Python? I can’t seem to find one.
But for now:
You need to talk about the Python execution model, how all values
> are objects,
When you say “execution model” it sound advanced. But if people are to
understand Python at all, they really need to know the basics:
Names vs Values
Identity vs equality
Mutable vs immutable
There is also the question of whether you are teaching Python to folks that
have some programming experience or teaching introductory programming to
complete newbies. I suspect the OP is doing the latter, and there is
something to be said for getting folks used to general programming concepts
before getting into the Python specifics.
An aside: checking identity (using is) is pretty rare in production code,
outside of “is None” ( and module-specific singletons) beginners will get
pretty darn far if they only know “is” in that context. Kind of like, as
Chris A suggested, how beginners will only know “with” in the context of
opening files, and don’t need to understand the concept of context managers
in general.
What I do is tell students they should use “is None” and then demonstrate
failure of == None with numpy arrays to make the point (I’m not teaching
numpy) In that case, they are not so much learning about object identity as
they are operator overloading—another topic that needs to be covered
eventually.
-CHB
>
> --
Christopher Barker, PhD (Chris)
Python Language Consulting
- Teaching
- Scientific Software Development
- Desktop GUI and Web Development
- wxPython, numpy, scipy, Cython
_______________________________________________
Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org
To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/
Message archived at
https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/R5O5M5HI5M7IAKIE5SELAKAL4HDJH6NJ/
Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
