[soc2008-general] Teaching Python

[Greg Wilson]

We're making progress on the ecosystem: for example, Stephan Diebel
has released a free cut-down version of the Wing IDE for people who
want something better than IDLE, but aren't ready to bite off Eclipse
and PyDev.  If we compare ourselves to Java (which is the 800 pound
gorilla in teaching), we still don't have style checking tools that
are as solid, usable, and well-documented as Checkstyle (no offense
to the PyLint and PyChecker people, of course).  *Everyone* I teach
complains about how hard it is to find things in the Python library
docs, but that's not a code problem; the whole matplotlib vs. Chaco
and Django vs. TurboGears situation doesn't help, but that's about
social engineering, not code; and of course, there aren't the thousands
of exercises lying around on the web for instructors to pick up and
plagiarize, as there are with other languages.  (We also can't teach
operating systems, graphics, and other upper-year topics in Python
yet, as we can in Java.)

Thanks,
Greg

Unni wrote:
> hi,
> liked the concept of developing a fully evolved ecosystem.
> could you state some solid needs that should be implemented.
> I see you mentioned something like PyGraphics, could you
> please elaborate?
> 
> On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 7:07 PM, Greg Wilson <gvwilson at cs.toronto.edu 
> <mailto:gvwilson at cs.toronto.edu>> wrote:
> 
>     For teaching, there's also the proposal to finish porting
>     Mark Guzdial's excellent lightweight multimedia library
>     from Jython to CPython, fix its bugs, move it forward to 3.0,
>     etc.  There was a lot of excitement about Python at SIGCSE
>     (the computer science education conference) two weeks ago, but
>     one of the things holding people back is the lack of a fully
>     developed ecosystem; things like PyGraphics will help a lot.
> 
>     Greg
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Cheers,
> Unni