[Edu-sig] AP Calc with Jupyter

[kirby urner]

On Fri, Jun 16, 2017 at 9:24 AM, Carl Karsten <carl at nextdayvideo.com> wrote:

> I think teaching python v2 will be more confusing, and less useful than
> learning v3.
>
>

I agree with you in principle Carl, re 3.x > 2.x, with less quibbling about
minor version number (in the case of Python: "each language comes with a
story" I tell my students).


> I know enough people using v3 professionally that I wouldn't shy away from
> it.
>
>
Since I had to venture out on my own following the closing of the O'Reilly
School (OST), I'm more in touch with a network of Python trainers /
teachers. My colleague Patrick, co-worker at OST (Python track) is flying
out to New England to preach 2.x in company already using it and with no
plans to ever upgrade.  Mostly we both teach Python 3, e.g. for ONLC.

They (the NH company) have a working machine, imagine a Victorian steam
engine that doesn't break, and see no point whatsoever in moving to 3.x
just for the hell of it (unlike Instagram, which made the leap and now
advises others on how it's doable).

On the other hand, teachers and developers are expected to be up on the
latest, so I feel compelled to write little scripts using asyncio (see link
below).

We have different use communities.  In science fiction, I imagine some
venerable companies two hundred years from now still running some 2.x
engine on a dedicated emulator, because it works and people are smarter in
the future and spend less time fixing what's not broken.

The business of this NH company has nothing to do with software directly.
Imagine a dedicated box that just prints invoices on a particular device,
and that's it.  It's like a micro-controller or micro-service.  We still
have bacteria running the same DNA after a billion years, don't we?

I'm still a tad confused on the Sage / on-line Jupyter Notebook situation,
was surprised to see the kernel names other than vanilla Python 2.x / 3.x
and instead seeing SAGE Python 2.7 and Anaconda 3.6 or whatever I saw.

Jorge starts right off using not-Python-syntax I thought I witnessed,
because Sage is somehow present on bootup?  I booted up that cloud service
myself and tried some stuff.  Still scratching my head.  Peter, do you use
this service too?

I do teach Jupyter Notebooks as a part of my Python classes.  Getting
students to realize they can run a web server locally and serve themselves,
no need for the Internet, is a number one priority, after which JN makes
more sense.  Boot a web server, have your browser run some Javascript with
JSON, and you're in business.  JN as a front end to pandas is like Office
on steroids, with web server Word and multi-dimensional Excel.

Kirby
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