[Edu-sig] Edu-sig Digest, Vol 27, Issue 36

[Toby Donaldson]

> 6.  I want to wrap this up with one more point that I'd love to see
> discussed here.  It seems to me that ideally, an educational
> programming language should emphasize one of the dominant programming
> paradigms in a very "pure" fashion.  But Python, as useful as it is,
> is anything but "pure".  Although I'm not an OO expert, I suspect that
> there are a number of features in Python that have OO-purists shaking
> their heads.  And I know that Python also holds several
> disappointments for FP-purists (lack of tail recursion, for example).
> Because Python is a pragmatic hybrid approach to programming, it can
> give you some sense for OO, and some sense for FP, but I worry that
> it's not really pure enough in either respect to get to the heart of
> either.

To paraphrase Stroustrup: if you want to program in Smalltalk, then
program in Smalltalk.

Toby
--
Dr. Toby Donaldson
School of Computing Science
Simon Fraser University (Surrey)