Where do they tech Python officialy ?

[Neil Cerutti]

On 2007-07-28, Omari Norman <omari at smileystation.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 23, 2007 at 10:48:10PM -0700, Paul Rubin wrote:
>  
>> If you're having trouble with Python because you're new at
>> programming, I can sympathize--I don't think it's the most
>> beginner-friendly of languages despite the efforts in that direction
>> by the designers.  
>
> Just curious--what language would you recommend as most
> beginner-friendly?

I recommend the symbolic logo-like Scheme used in _Simply
Scheme_. It works with sentences and words polymorphically.

(first smith)
s

(first '(smith jones cooper))
smith

The books exercises revolve around writing functions like
pig-latin, reverse, palindrom?, and other word and sentence
manipulations. Real Scheme primitives are not introduced until
lots of programming ideas have been conveyed.

http://www.amazon.com/Simply-Scheme-Introducing-Computer-Science/dp/0262082810

> In college I had a programming course that used C++. Big
> mistake in my view, and we didn't learn much in the way of true
> principles (in retrospect it would have been nice if they had
> us use GCC rather than Borland on Windows.)

I can imagine a course using C++ that taught basic programming
concepts; it would teach the rudiments of using the STL to start,
and work with vectors, lists and maps. See _Accelerated C++_ for
a great example.

But most C++ courses start with the lowest level functionality of
C++, soon embroiling inexperienced programmers with the
difficulties of manual dynamic memory management. That's a big
side-show.

-- 
Neil Cerutti