[Edu-sig] The fate of raw_input() in Python 3000

[Arthur]

John Zelle wrote:

>I think it's obvious to everyone that a course that tackles "real world" 
>problems will be more interesting than one that doesn't. But that doesn't 
>mean simple scripts can't address real world issues. 
>
But there is a basic, probably irreversible - anti-synergistic - 
evolution that seems to have occurred that has exasperated the problem. 
The peeling off of programming introduction to CS, and the peeling off 
of CS from everything else.

Seems to me that in order to tackle real world problems we should be 
working within a specific problem domain - as a starting point. Within a 
particular domain, it is more realistic to build in stages, to the point 
of getting to something useful - within that domain.

For many of us, "introduction to programming" is too broad a context in 
which to be  introduced to programming.

In the math/programming synergy at an earlier stage (not too early, 
please) strategy,  the introduction course in the CS department evolves 
into something more than what it apparently needs to be now. We know a 
little, and presumably know we have an interest in knowing more than that.

Kirby, it seems to me, is right about all this.  It's just less 
brilliant to be right about this than Kirby sometimes seems to make it 
sound.  It really is nothing more than accepting the obvious, give up on 
beating the game, and just play it.

The push back on this strategy here  had always been yuck, Math.  We are 
turning on back on the artist, the literature types, the hardcore gamer, 
the web.

Yuck on that position, IMO. "What is" isn't infinitely malleable. We are 
only saying what most obviously is. Where a foundation of and for 
computing understanding most appropriately grounds itself.

The "yuck math" is a position I came to identify with CPUE, early on .  
Perhaps wrongly, or prematurely, but the association is there. And why I 
found it necessary to bury that banner, for myself - more than any other 
reason.

Kirby seems to have done better.

End of polemics.

Art