[Edu-sig] Code to Joy in The Economist (June/July 2018)

[Carl Karsten]

> But you are totally right, Kirby - we've got to get him off of this notion of variables as containers. "Post-its, not buckets" is the way I put it, but I rather like the luggage tag metaphor as well.

You lost me here.  What's wrong with bucket?


On Sat, Jun 2, 2018 at 3:25 PM, Naomi Ceder <naomi.ceder at gmail.com> wrote:
> It is a lovely article. Andrew Smith was at PyCon and I had dinner with him
> and Nicholas one evening and also sat down and chatted with Andrew on a
> couple of other occasions.
>
> He's a smart guy and a likable one, and he is very taken with coding in
> general, Python in particular, and especially the Python community, and he
> plans to keep going beyond just that article. I fully expect we'll see and
> hear more of Andrew Smith's adventures with Python over the coming year or
> two.
>
> But you are totally right, Kirby - we've got to get him off of this notion
> of variables as containers. "Post-its, not buckets" is the way I put it, but
> I rather like the luggage tag metaphor as well.
>
> And for those of us who are geeks "of a certain age" I can also recommend
> his book Moondust, which is the story of him tracking down and talking to
> all of the surviving Apollo astronauts in the early 2000's.
>
> Cheers,
> Naomi
>
> On Sat, 2 Jun 2018 at 15:13, kirby urner <kirby.urner at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> One of my screen scraper friends (always reading) just forwarded this
>> link:
>>
>> https://www.1843magazine.com/features/code-to-joy
>>
>> A highly literate middle aged writer tackles programming from zero and
>> winds up in Python after a pilgrimmage through Javascript, and uses the
>> Twitter API.  He meditates on what learning to code might mean to a fully
>> developed adult such as himself (connects to Andragogy **).
>>
>> Nicholas Tollervey, sometime edu-sig poster and Micro:bit avatar, is very
>> much a hero in this story, living up to the ideal of a Pythonista as
>>
>> (A) not religiously dogmatic (re "language wars") yet
>> (B) having enthusiasm for sharing Python (without too much proselytizing).
>>
>> Bravo on a stellar performance!
>>
>> Quincy Larson of freeCodeCamp fame is another champion of openness and
>> accessibility (and good advice).  I get his emails in my inbox with
>> gratitude, though I don't follow all the links (helpfully labeled with
>> estimated reading times, for my internal scheduler -- thanks for the
>> meta-data!).
>>
>> In the interests of sparking some edu-sig type discussion (this could fork
>> to a new thread), the author Andrew Smith writes:
>>
>> "Variables are best (if imperfectly) understood as the vessels within
>> which pieces of data are contained, ready to be worked on. Of many possible
>> data types, the most straightforward are numbers and strings, string being
>> the name given to text."
>>
>> In my classes I readily acknowledge the "variable as container" metaphor
>> is apt, and agree that Python objects take up memory and so object ==
>> container (with id) is OK too.
>>
>> However, the name --> object mapping of a namespace is better imagined as
>> "luggage tag -> suitcase" relationship. It's not like the Python name itself
>> is the container on the heap.
>>
>> The object in memory is a possibly fat heavy suitcase, stuffed with stuff
>> (e.g. an HttpResponse).  However the name is more a label, like a luggage
>> tag on a suitcase (and this is the point).
>>
>> Name : Object :: Luggage Tags :: Suitcase
>>
>> One suitcase (object) may have many names (connects to garbage collection
>> discussion).  However at any one moment, a name points to only one object
>> (the same name in different modules, both running, still count as different
>> names -- scope matters).
>>
>> So yeah, the object itself is a "container" but what it contains may be
>> tags to other objects.
>>
>> Without this separation of "names" from "objects" there's an inevitable
>> tendency to imagine copies, as how can we have two bowls or boxes with
>> exactly the same content.
>>
>> We don't have a visual metaphor for "two suitcases containing exactly the
>> same clothes at the same time".
>>
>> But we do understand "one suitcase having two or more luggage tags."
>>
>> Surely we have two copies, albeit clones of the same thing.  Not so in
>> Python though.  Python is biased against making gratuitous copies of
>> anything.  Keep is spare! (sparse if possible).  Don't clutter memory with
>> excessive redundancy.
>>
>>
>> Kirby
>>
>> **
>> http://4dsolutions.net/presentations/pycon2013.pdf
>>
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Naomi Ceder
>
> @NaomiCeder • https://www.linkedin.com/in/naomiceder/
> https://www.manning.com/books/the-quick-python-book-third-edition
>
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