On Jun 13, 12:46 am, John Ladasky <john_lada...@sbcglobal.net> wrote: > Hi folks, > > My son is 17 years old. He just took a one-year course in web page design at > his high school. HTML is worth knowing, I suppose, and I think he has also > done a little Javascript. He has expressed an interest in eventually wanting > to program 3D video games. > > For that purpose, HTML and Javascript are too limited. I hardly consider > either one to be a real programming language. I want to get him started with > a real applications programming language -- Python, of course. And he's > ready to learn. OK, so it's not necessarily a fast enough language for the > epic video games he envisions, but it's a darn good start. I'll tax his > brain with a compiled language like C at some other time. > > He's a smart kid, but prefers to be shown, to be tutored, rather than having > the patience to sit down and RTFM. Have any of you been down this road > before? I would appreciate it if you would share your experiences, or > provide resource material. > > Thanks!
Some views of mine (controversial!). Python is at least two things, a language and a culture. As a language its exceptionally dogma-neutral. You can do OO or FP, throwaway one-off scripts or long-term system building etc However as a culture it seems to prefer the OO style to the FP style. This is unfortunate given that OO is on the down and FP is on a rise. Some thoughts re OOP: http://blog.languager.org/2012/07/we-dont-need-no-ooooo-orientation-4.html So my suggestion is use some rigorous FPL like Haskell to learn/teach programming. After that you can switch to python or some other realistic language. Note: I have some serious reservations regarding Haskell http://blog.languager.org/2012/08/functional-programming-philosophical.html Nevertheless it seems to be the best there is at the moment. tl;dr: Haskell is in 2013 what Pascal was in 1970 -- good for programming pedagogy. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list