[Python-ideas] Python 3000 TIOBE -3% (Massimo Di Pierro)

[Guido van Rossum]

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 9:00 PM, C. Titus Brown <ctb at msu.edu> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 09, 2012 at 04:02:34PM -0800, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> > Sadly, it's quite frequent that works really well in an educational
> setting
> > shouldn't be recommended in a professional programming environment, and
> > vice versa. I'm not sure how to answer this except by creating,
> maintaining
> > and promoting some wiki pages aimed specifically at instructors.
>
> Perhaps I am brainfried ATM, but I cannot imagine what you are talking
> about
> here.  Do you have any examples you can share that illustrate what you
> mean?
>

Simplest example: many educators seem delighted with Python 3 because it
solves a bunch of beginner's pitfalls, and their students learn in a
greenfield situation. (Though this is not the case for Massimo.)
Professionals OTOH don't seem to like Python 3 because it means they have
to change a pile of software that took them a decade (and an army of
programmers) to create.

Educators also often give their students a simple library of convenience
functions and tell them to put the magic line "from blah import *" at the
top of their module (or session). Again something that most professionals
loathe, but it works well for the first steps in programming -- certainly
better than the Java approach "copy these ten lines of gobbledygook [the
minimal "hello world" in Java] into your file, don't ask what they mean,
and above all be careful not to accidentally edit any of them".

OTOH when educators want their students to install some 3rd party package
it is often something hideously complex like pygame, rather than something
simple and elegant like WebOb or flask.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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