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To science majors? No. It lacks so many of the things you'd need to get them started (e.g. a REPL/notebook server, interactive plotting, a "here's everything yo
by aragilar 4y ago
To science majors? No. It lacks so many of the things you'd need to get them started (e.g. a REPL/notebook server, interactive plotting, a "here's everything you need" install (a.k.a conda)), and most (but not all) students have no real interest in learning to program. You could get the interested-in-programming ones to learn Rust, but then they're going to hit the large legacy of existing code and wonder why you taught them something that not related to what they're going to use.
- zozbot234 4y agoThere's an interesting experimental project for a Rust REPL and notebook interface at https://github.com/google/evcxr https://github.com/google/evcxr . Other things, e.g. semi-officially endorsed collections of community crates with no strong backward compatibility guarantees, have seen some development already. > but then they're going to hit the large legacy of existing code and wonder why you taught them something that not related to what they're going to use. OTOH other languages should be easier to learn by reference to a comparatively elegant language like Rust. Python, Fortran, C++ etc. have almost nothing in common but Rust could arguably be a good introductory baseline that shares features with all of these.