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I had an interesting debate with a respected colleague at a British university about this once. My view was that teaching kids should be in a way that is "real"

by jll29 4y ago

I had an interesting debate with a respected colleague at a British university about this once. My view was that teaching kids should be in a way that is "real", e.g. typing in Python code and not "toy" (e.g. Scratch) so that - they can get a feel for how real-life programmers work; - they can incrementally refine and build on what they know until they have picked up a very valuable (in terms of job market) skill I agree Scratch is sufficient to understand loops etc. but it doesn't "scale", i.e. at some point you need to switch over from Scratch to an "grown-up" language.

zozbot234 4y ago
Python is actually a pretty bad language for novice coders, the programming model is way too complicated and hard to get a feel for. I'm not sure how people can even manage to "learn to code" via Python alone.
- antod 4y ago
  I remember reading "Learning Python" in the 1.5 days and then a bit later properly using Python the 2.0 days. It seemed a lot simpler back then, and seemed like a clean powerful successor to the 8bit BASICs I started with. And nothing else at the time seemed to capture that clean easy on ramp to coding feeling, but still allowing you to go much further than eg an 8bit BASIC. Presumably if you limited which parts of the now massive 3.10 you exposed to newbies, you could still get the same result? The very basics haven't changed too much since 20+ yrs ago. I suppose the trouble is that any web searching is going send newbies off the tracks into advanced topics pretty quickly now, but that is still likely in just about any language.
  - rodgerd 4y ago
    The problem is that any conversation around "learning Python" will very quickly disappear into strong opinions on setting up environments, the right way to structure everything, what is and isn't Pythonic, and so on. Shielding beginners from those kind of conversations seems to get harder and harder over time.

by jll29 4y ago

zozbot234 4y ago

Python is actually a pretty bad language for novice coders, the programming model is way too complicated and hard to get a feel for. I'm not sure how people can even manage to "learn to code" via Python alone.

antod 4y ago
I remember reading "Learning Python" in the 1.5 days and then a bit later properly using Python the 2.0 days. It seemed a lot simpler back then, and seemed like a clean powerful successor to the 8bit BASICs I started with. And nothing else at the time seemed to capture that clean easy on ramp to coding feeling, but still allowing you to go much further than eg an 8bit BASIC. Presumably if you limited which parts of the now massive 3.10 you exposed to newbies, you could still get the same result? The very basics haven't changed too much since 20+ yrs ago. I suppose the trouble is that any web searching is going send newbies off the tracks into advanced topics pretty quickly now, but that is still likely in just about any language.
- rodgerd 4y ago
  The problem is that any conversation around "learning Python" will very quickly disappear into strong opinions on setting up environments, the right way to structure everything, what is and isn't Pythonic, and so on. Shielding beginners from those kind of conversations seems to get harder and harder over time.