On Fri, Jun 22, 2018 at 7:28 PM, Chris Barker via Python-Dev <python-dev@python.org> wrote:

But once it becomes a more common idiom, students will see it in the wild pretty early in their path to learning python. So we'll need to start introducing it earlier than later.

I think this reflects that the "smaller" a language is, the easier it is to learn.

For what it's worth, Chris's thoughts are close to my own here. I and several of my colleagues teach week-long Python courses for Enthought. The target audience is mostly scientists and data scientists (many of whom are coming from MATLAB or R or IDL or Excel/VBA or some other development environment, but some of whom are new to programming altogether), and our curriculum is Python, NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, plus additional course-specific bits and pieces (scikit-learn, NLTK, seaborn, statsmodels, GUI-building, Cython, HPC, etc., etc.).

There's a constant struggle to keep the Python portion of the course large enough to be coherent and useful, but small enough to allow time for the other topics. To that end, we separate the Python piece of the course into "core topics" that are essential for the later parts, and "advanced topics" that can be covered if time allows, or if we get relevant questions. I can't see a way that the assignment expression wouldn't have to be part of the core topics. async stuff only appears in async code, and it's easy to compartmentalize; in contrast, I'd expect that once the assignment expression took hold we'd be seeing it in a lot of code, independent of the domain.

And yes, I too see enough confusion with "is" vs == already, and don't relish the prospect of teaching := in addition to those.

That's with my Python-teaching hat on. With my Python-developer hat on, my thoughts are slightly different, but that's off-topic for this thread, and I don't think I have anything to say that hasn't already been said many times by others, so I'll keep quiet about that bit. :-)

Mark