Advice on giving a python course

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

Courageous <jkraska1 at san.rr.com> writes:

> Your mistake there was not realizing that while it may have
> been difficult to express the easy things, you would have
> discovered Lisp to be quite a bit easier at expressing the
> very, very difficult things than all other noteworthy languages
> of the time. In fact, it's still very, very good at it.

Surprisingly enough, Python has taught me more about Lisp than Lisp
ever did ;-).  There's some very powerful stuff there, but the
'fingernail clippings in oatmeal' feature is the one which is most
immediately apparent to someone who doesn't know programming.  In
order to understand the powerful object model, conceptual consistency,
etc, etc, you have to get to the point where you understand the
concepts *first*.

Python's much-hated (and much-loved) whitespace is a great advantage
in this regard.  It makes things much easier to read if you don't know
what the concepts involved are about to begin with.

For example, in some code I wrote recently:

def get_description(self, observer):
    car=self.car
    if observer.place is car:
        return car.interior
    else:
        return car.exterior

You can do the translation to lisp yourself: I thought of a few, but
none of them seemed even close to the clarity that you can see here.

Remember I'm talking about programming languages for children, not
computer scientists :-) Lisp is very cool, and if a worthwhile
implementation existed, I'd probably use it more.

(BTW: I learned lisp from "the little LISPer", not reading the CL spec
^_^ just so y'all don't think that it was overtechnical training
documentation that turned me off...)

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