Teaching python (programming) to children

[Peter Hansen]

David Andreas Alderud wrote:
> 
> > I think we were talking about *children*, who are definitely not interested
> > in writing efficient programs...  Don't mix first-year students who might
> > want to learn about the guts of a PC with the audience which was targetted
> > by this discussion.
> 
> You're underestimating children, don't do that, please. I've been teaching
> everything from 7 year olds to university students, the 7 to 9 year olds are
> by far the most powerful students, they are like vacuum cleaners, absorbing
> every piece of knowledge presented to them.

Oh puhleeezzz...  Good luck finding one seven year old who is more
interested in *efficiency* than learning about computers.  Yes,
kids absorb everything.  No, they do not understand or care about
"efficiency", and I don't think I'm underestimating "children".
Maybe one or two in the world, but not this part of the planet
(and note I'm not equating efficiency with optimization... kids
might want to learn to make something go faster, but that's
not what "efficiency" means to me.)

> > So what do *you* mean by "hardware programming"?
> 
> Writing devicedrivers and accompanying APIs, for example.

As expected, this explains our differing view of Python's suitability.
I agree (obviously) that Python is not suitable for device drivers, 
although "accompanying APIs" expands that just enough for me to 
point out that one can keep a driver "thin" and put the next-higher 
level in a more flexible language, provided adequate performance 
is still available.  I do that with Python, which keeps me out of 
the really low-level stuff more often than not.

> Ada is great for hardware programming, one major reason is because PGAs and
> FPGAs are, normally, coded in VHDL, which is a subset of Ada. So with Ada

Cool.  I did not know that about VHDL.

-- 
----------------------
Peter Hansen, P.Eng.
peter at engcorp.com