4 ms·

Well, after the first programming lesson, they are no longer magic. In python, they are never demystified.

• earenndil 8y ago
  Right. Let's learn 50% of all the mechanical aspects of programming in one lesson. Those just serve to get in the way of initial learning, general program flow and logic.
  • eksemplar 8y ago
    Those few topics aren’t close to being 50% of the mechanical aspects of programming. What are you even on about? Furthermore they are all easily explainable concepts that any CS student will be able to grasp once they reach their first programming language course. I’d say most of the concepts are easy for non-CS students as well. Access modifiers, especially public and private aren’t hard concepts, are they? Yet they are insanely important to your basic understanding of what a function does. Private is like singing in the shower, you’re doing it for you. Public is like signing at a concert hall, there you’re signing for the audience. Return values are values functions return, your can think of them as the result a calculator gives your when you ask it to add 2 and 2, here the return value is 4. Types are typically the first thing you explain anyway, including when you teach python. Maybe you could get people writing complicated functions faster in python, but why would you want to? The purpose of teaching programming isn’t to have people writing code as fast as possible, it’s to teach them to understand what the hell it is they are writing, so they’ll know why they do it.