[Edu-sig] CS50 lecture (Harvard)... good job!

[kirby urner]

https://youtu.be/5aP9Bl9hcqI

I think this lecture by David J. Malan of Harvard, introducing Python in
Week 8, having slogged through C already, is top notch.

He's using Python 3 and really covering a ton of material, with lots of
references back to the C lectures. This is the only lecture of the series
I've seen at this point.

He somewhat reveals has Perl background (a lineage he confesses to) in
treating a module so much like a class, to where he starts calling
functions methods just because their imported and belong to some module.
In Perl, entire modules got blessed as classes as I recall.

On the topic of 'if __name__ == "__main__"', he's quite good on that but
seems to tie it to calling a function called main() every time.  I prefer
to explain that module may in principal be the one running top-level, with
everything else imported.  When imported, a module is never "__main__" by
default, so here's a way to provide a "just in case" section, containing
whatever.

He's good on Python being a both a language and a machine to combines
compiling and running into a single step, with bytecode the intermediate
runtime language. He didn't stop to talk about the different versions of
Python in the sense of CPython, Jython, Iron Python and PyPy. I thought he
would. Maybe in Week 9.

Within one two hour episode he's taken us all the way from simple
assignment and string formatting, to writing a simple Flask application
complete with Jinja2.  As someone who has lectured on Python quite a bit, I
have to admire the guy's stamina and sustained coherence.

Kirby

PS:  along those lines, I've been pumping out a bunch of Youtubes recently,
two of which feature repl.it using Python.  My scripts are somewhat trivial
this time, whereas in past Youtubes I've been showing off fancy VPython:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeBIlkJm4xglicSifacG4eewD9CQaWvU0

It'll suggest you log in / create account but you don't have to.  Cool
service though, you might wanna:

S Factor  -- introduces REPL.IT
https://repl.it/Glmi/6

RD to RT -- extended precision Decimal
https://repl.it/Gqyp/0

Fancier Python at work:
More About Hypertoons (VPython)

(all of these a part of the above Youtube playlist: Synergetics 101)
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