Teaching python (programming) to children

[David Bolen]

"Arthur Siegel" <ajs at ix.netcom.com> writes:

> Cliff writes -
> 
> >One of Python's strengths is that almost every 
> >line of code is related to solving the programmer's 
> >goal rather than telling the compiler how to 
> >compile the code.
> 
> Which has been my experience, and why I think
> I was more successful with Python than with
> other languages I false-started with before I
> came to it.
> 
> In effect, my interest was not in learning
> programming, but in accomplishing some things
> for which an understanding of programming
> happens to have been an essential.

I agree, and also find this aspect of Python very seductive and
addicting.  Of course, outside of the learning environment, it does
carry a penalty - typically performance, since it's accomplished by
pushing most everything to dynamic runtime.

So there's likely always to be room for languages that provide more
details at compile time to the compilers, and I think that being
exposed to that fact, and that manner of thinking, would also be
helpful in an introduction to programming.

Then again, some of the functional languages (such as the ML-based
ones) seem to do a really nice inference job to get back a lot of
performance without much declaration.

--
-- David
-- 
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