Steven D'Aprano writes:
On Fri, Nov 29, 2019 at 12:55:13AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Abdur-Rahmaan Janhangeer writes:
"Designed With Learning in Mind"
That's Python. Guido said so from the beginning,
Is it? Did he? Do you have references for that?
Yes, it is in my opinion (I use it in teaching all the time in the same way I would use pseudo-code, and I haven't taught a class in programming in 25 years). Yes, he did. No, just my memory of occasions where he has said or posted that use of Python as a teaching language informed his design philosophy and decisions (which is the minimum that "with learning in mind" implies).
Python is not Scratch, nor is it ABC. ABC was a *big* influence on the evolution of Python, but (in my opinion) at least half of that influence was to convince Guido *not* to make Python "designed with learning in mind".
"Design with learning in mind" literally means "don't forget about beginners in Python and in programming", not "sacrifice everything else on the altar of education".
For example, ABC used its own alledgedly "beginner friendly" terminology that nobody else in programming used; Python mostly sticks to common terminology used by other languages which will be recognised by programmers coming from other languages.
Which is a decision that has learning Python (vs. learning programming in general) in mind, no?
Off-topic:
I'm consistently and frequently frustrated by the community's use of PEP id numbers as jargon. I consider it to be a classic example of the use of jargon to exclude, rather than the sense of using it to streamline communication.
Jargon has a third role: to identify members of the community. Of course that overlaps with exclusion, but it's not the same. And PEP numbers have a fourth purpose when used as jargon (this applies to any numbered formal standard such as RFCs or ISO): they are self-citing. In that sense, they are *inclusive*. They're an invitation to learn more than you ever wanted to know about the things the community cares about.
Apart from PEP 8, I don't know a single PEP id off by heart (not even the PEPs I have authored)
I know more that that (off the top of my head, 0, 1, 7, 8, 263, 383, 393, 484, and 3000, none of which I authored although I was extremely noisy about 263), which is less than 2% I guess. But when I type "pep" into my browser's address bar, I get "https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0000/" as the top choice. I then substitute the PEP number for "0000" and voilà! Self-citing. Most people will have to work a little harder at first, but if they do it a few times they will be rewarded with a well-trained browser.
and your footnote above reads as pure gobbledygook to me.
That's what footnotes are for: to hold gobbledygook that only the initiated or directly concerned will care about. I put it there so readers could ignore it if they wanted to without interrupting the flow. Little did I know it would trigger a rant.
There is not enough context to guess the meaning of 3107 or 484 (Guido intended 3107 to support 484 did he? how uninformative) so there is nothing to be done except to stop reading, switch to a browser, and google them both.
Which was my intention, because I wanted readers to be able to easily confirm the metadata (specifically, dates). Self-citing. Steve