Making a better textbook (was Re: The Deitel book)

[Dave Reed]

> From: claird at lairds.com (Cameron Laird)

<snip>

> There's a real range in university courses.  Indeed,
> a depressing number of them are still stuck at syntax
> level.
> 
> Dave Reed, are you serious that decision-makers dis-
> qualify Python for the lack of enforced private 
> members?  Should I take it that they equally proscribe
> (conventionally pre-processed) C and C++?


That's just my impression/what I think is one of the biggest issues
that would discourage some academic types from switching to Python. I
don't have any hard evidence to support it. Obviously this didn't stop
me, but I'm relatively young for a college prof (early 30s), find
Python programming extremely fun, and definitely lean toward the
practical side of things. The other person in my dept. who teaches CS1
is about 20 years older than me and it didn't take much effort to
convince him to switch to Python even though I pointed out the lack of
private data to him. Of course, he has learned to hate C++ so that
made persuading him much easier :-)

Note: I am NOT advocating adding private members/methods to Python.

Dave