Arthur Siegel wrote:
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
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