Teaching Programming

[Dave Angel]

Ethan Furman wrote:
> <div class="moz-text-flowed" style="font-family: -moz-fixed">Andre 
> Engels wrote:
>> On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 4:35 PM, James Mills
>> <prologic at shortcircuit.net.au> wrote:
>>> On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 12:21 AM, Ed Keith <e_d_k at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>> To deal with indentation I had to
>>>>
>>>>   1) keep track of indentation of all chunks of code embedded in the
>>>>      document and indent inserted chunks to the sum of all the
>>>>      indentation of the enclosing chunks.
>>> In my experience of non-indentation sensitive languages
>>> such as C-class (curly braces) it's just as hard to keep track
>>> of opening and closing braces.
>>
>> Although I have little or no experience with this, I still dare to say
>> that I don't agree. The difference is that in C you do not _need_ to
>> know where in the braces-defined hierarchy you are. You just embed or
>> change a piece of code at the right location. In Python however you
>> _do_ need to know how far your code is to be indented.
>
> And how do you know where the right location is?  You have to figure 
> it out from the different (nested) braces at the 'right' location.  
> For me, at least, it's much easier to get that information from the 
> already indented Python code, as opposed to indenting (and 
> double-checking the indents) on the braces language.
>
> ~Ethan~
>
>
Much more important to be able to read code reliably than write it quickly.

When I was heavily doing C++ I found myself wishing that incorrect 
indentation would be an error or at least a warning.  And I hadn't ever 
heard of Python.  When I did, I said "About time!"

Of course, I was surrounded by many programmers who ignored any warning 
that the compiler produced, while I cranked up warnings  to max, with 
pedantic.

On one project I generated C++ code, about 20k lines.  And it was all 
indented and commented.  Most of that code went through the code 
generator twice.  The "source" was a header file from outside my 
organization.  The generator used that to create a new header, more 
detailed.  Then the generator used that to create source & headers that 
were actually used by the project.

DaveA