Danny writes -
Yes, I also agree that code should be treated as literature. As writers, we have a responsibility to do our fair share of reading good code! I'm not sure if Microsoft Access qualifies, but it must be better than nothing. *grin*
And this from the Eric Raymond entry on Agile Porgramming that Jason pointed to a few posts back. """ Working software over comprehensive documentation. That's us, too. In fact, the radical hacker position is that source code of a working system is its documentation. We, more than any other culture of software engineering, emphasize program source code as human-to-human communication that is expected to bind together communities of cooperation and understanding distributed through time and space. In this, too, we build on and amplify Unix tradition. """ And I can't help making this related point, as much as I am sure folks are uninterested in hearing me talk about my pet project. And depsite the fact I am supposed to be uninterested in the uninterested. But a key idea behind PyGeo is that the source as literature is part of the application. The concept though is not so much to expose the programming logic, but to expose the analytics. The "synthetic" geoemetry we are seeing on the screen is being driven by the analytic geometry accessbile in the code. And this synthesizes the study of geometry in a way that was not before (mass access to computers) possible in quite the same way. By having the source in Python (and accepting a bit of a performance hit) I am able to, I think, expose the analytics much more clearly to the non-specialist (in programming) than I might be able to so in any other programming language of which I am aware.
The only time I saw code reading really emphasized in high school, though, was during the reading of test questions; we were otherwise left to our own devices. But what kinds of good Python "literature" can educators use?
As far as I am capable, I am making that effort with the PyGeo code. The fact is that using geometric "objects" to introduce programming concepts (such as OOP inheritance), is an established tradition, almost as endemic as the "Hello World" program. I accept the fact that I am not fully capable. I find it harder to accept the fact that because there is lots of math in there, it is unfit for the purpose, as there seems to be some growing Chinese wall between math and programming education. Which is horribly misguided, IMO. Art