[Edu-sig] Articles of possible interest

[Guido van Rossum]

> 	As most of you probably already know, _Linux Journal_ just put out
> a Python supplement that includes an article on CP4E by Guido van Rossum.
> 
> 	I have been lurking for a while on edu-sig, and have read its
> archive, so of course I was pleased to see the article. I found myself
> reacting rather strongly to it, and have written up my observations and
> placed them on the Web.
> 
> 	I decided not to bring them forward here because a) I am a total
> edu-sig newbie, b) some of my observations are tangential to CP4E, and c)
> most, if not all, of my observations are rather polemical.
> 
> 	The essay I have written can be found at
> http://www.terracom.net/~dorothea/femhack.html. I will be around edu-sig if
> anything I have written deserves comment here.

Thanks for the reality check, Dorothea!  And there I tried to be
enlightened in portraying more girls in programming class than you
currently find...

I had wanted the examples to be more realistic, but I don't really
know any girls (or boys!) in the ages described in the article, and I
still don't have the faintest idea what kind of games or other
activities *would* appeal to them so I could make the examples.
(Surely not Pokemon!)  I remember what I liked myself around that age,
but I was probably several standard deviations away from the norm, and
too socially inept to know what the girls were interested in.

I did realize before it went to press that girls of that age no longer
play with Barbies, but I didn't know what to substitute, and neither
did my fiancee.  I figured that 95% of the audience would be men like
me who wouldn't notice the cultural discontinuity, so I decided to
leave it in...

Coming around to your plea for more text processing: good point.  I
still believe that many kids would find text processing boring (you
must have a more than average interest in it given your interest in
linguistics), and to really show off the power of today's computers,
graphics are in order.  Searching a million words in under a second
isn't quite as impressive as displaying realistic full-screen 3-D
animation at 30 frames per second, I think, and the latter appeals
more to people who can't program at all, Internet search engines not
withstanding.

I also believe strongly that graphical user interfaces (if done well!)
are better than text interfaces for most things, including debugging.
Interestingly enough, I believe that programming itself,
i.e. expressing the intended operation of a computer program, is best
done through text.  I guess that means that I believe that text
(symbols) is more powerful than images; while a picture may be worth a
thousand words, in my experience, most meaningful collections of a
thousand words are hard to capture in a picture.  (You can also see
a program as a two-dimensional picture made up out of symbols.)

I hope that you could see through my biased examples and found some
information on where I think IDLE should go.  I'd love to discuss that
here or in the idle-dev list.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)