[Edu-sig] interactive python tutorial online (as tryruby)

[kirby urner]

> <usenet etiquette rant>
> And I don't understand why the quoted message appeared to be a reply
> to what I wrote when not a single line of quoted text was something I
> wrote.
> </usenet etiquette rant>
>
> André

My apologies for generating such confusion.

This is what I was ranting about, not something you wrote:

>>> On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 10:06 AM, Jurgis Pralgauskis
>>> <jurgis.pralgauskis at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> it would make python more attractive,

And I was not disagreeing with Jurgis really, or you, i.e. anything we
might do to keep up with Ruby might be worth doing, like having
serious OpenGL as a part of the "batteries included".

But I've always argued VPython was fine off to the side, even if a
nightmare to install, don't need to bloat the standard library, plus
we have PIL for the static stuff.

These are the real reasons Ruby is exciting (Haskell as well):
because how simple computer graphics become, with so little code.
Like in Mathematica, you can interactively pass a photograph through
the shell, as an argument to functions, and get Photoshop-like
transforms, special effects.  That's "coolio".

Praise Allah this is nothing like the bad old days with Basic and
Pascal (or even Logo for that matter -- not that simple matter to code
Mandelbrots with turtles, plus it's not as good with data structures,
never had industrial strength potential, more a toy, a very good one).

In terms of superseding the hegemony and authority of the "calculator
warrior" generation, I'm all for using Ruby if that helps.  Anything
to spare another generation from being left out of the loop, when it
comes to globally marketable skills.

Ruby looks great on a resume, "know how to use a TI" is far less interesting.

There's nothing wrong with Python, in any case, as a language.

The Ruby community is very good at hype (on top of having a
substantial language), but so is this one.

Kirby