Thanks to all for the suggestions. At 02:13 PM 1/27/2009 -0800, kirby urner wrote:
Does it have to be either/or?
I'm somewhat weak in the PHP department but only by choice, know I could learn it pronto from Safari, as the concepts are pretty much the same. ...
But is your department smallish, no room in the inn for more than one language?
Our Reed College in Portland has an ad in the paper for web framework developer, asking for PHP, Python and Ruby savvy. That seems like a good mix. Why not push that?
The goal is to teach fundamentals, not specific languages or applications. Our community college has a course in PHP (also Word, Excel, etc.) Also, as you point out, students can learn these pronto from Safari, once they understand the concepts. U of A freshmen currently have two choices - Java or C. Python is pretty close to Java, and I'm assuming much easier to use for website development (not familiar with what's available in Java, just an extrapolation from other projects comparing Java and Python). I know PHP is very popular in website development, but I've heard it is insecure, so I would worry about using it to run student code on a webserver. On a personal level, I probably won't be involved if the decision is PHP. I just can't see learning a whole new language for one project. Now if someone were to convince me that PHP, Ruby, or whatever, had some fundamental advantage over Python, I might change my mind. At 06:27 PM 1/27/2009 -0400, Andre Roberge wrote:
Have a look at Crunchy (http://code.google.com/p/crunchy) and in particular the doctest capability. It does not (yet) have the ability to add student scores but that could be added; otherwise, I believe it would have what you need.
Nice Python tutorial! What I need, however is something like a framework that can be used for other topics, not just Python. I see from page one of your tutorial that you have the same security concern as I do about running student code, and possibly crashing the University webserver. Maybe what we need is a private server, or at least a VPS, so a crash wouldn't affect anyone but this group of students. I guess I'll look into some of the "full-stack" frameworks at http://wiki.python.org/moin/WebFrameworks. -- Dave
On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 1:57 PM, David MacQuigg <macquigg@ece.arizona.edu> wrote:
The CS Dept is considering putting a bunch of courses online, using PHP as both the development language, and as a new language to teach students. I've suggested using Python instead. I need to put together a quick demo. I'm thinking of something like javabat.com.
I've used Mod_python (the Apache/Python integration), but I'm not yet proficient. Now is the time to change course, if there is a better path.
Students will be entering Python code snippets into a window, and we need to run the code on a bunch of test cases, giving immediate feedback on errors, and accumulating the students' scores and work-in-progress. Running user code is a bit more of a challenge than running our code on user data, but javabat has inspired me.
Any recommendations?
-- Dave
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 5:54 PM, David MacQuigg <macquigg@ece.arizona.edu> wrote: << SNIP >>
The goal is to teach fundamentals, not specific languages or applications. Our community college has a course in PHP (also Word, Excel, etc.) Also, as you point out, students can learn these pronto from Safari, once they understand the concepts.
Thank you for clarifying sir. Yes, Safari or any online collection of relevant documentation, is a requirement for getting the job done. Even if you're highly expert in one area, you're bound to stray into another where you must hit the books. An important goal is to role model "life long learner" -- not just giving lip service to that around here.
U of A freshmen currently have two choices - Java or C. Python is pretty close to Java, and I'm assuming much easier to use for website development (not familiar with what's available in Java, just an extrapolation from other projects comparing Java and Python). I know PHP is very popular in website development, but I've heard it is insecure, so I would worry about using it to run student code on a webserver.
If the idea is to use PHP as a general purpose agile, in contrast to a system language, then I think that's a bad idea. Few people write standalone applications in PHP, as PHP books will be the first to admit e.g. MySQL and PHP from Scratch, (c) 2000, QUE PHP is very web-centric. Please tell your administration that basing core studies on PHP is frowned upon, or find me one high prestige institution that does it, maybe I'm all wet. Even as a web development language, I think it's being eclipsed.
On a personal level, I probably won't be involved if the decision is PHP. I just can't see learning a whole new language for one project. Now if someone were to convince me that PHP, Ruby, or whatever, had some fundamental advantage over Python, I might change my mind.
Ruby and PHP are not in the same category in my mind. I'd say Python has better libraries and is in no way inferior to Ruby. You'll hear Ruby people saying things like "it just feels better" but that's just Coke versus Pepsi, not computer science. Kirby
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kirby urner