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While I agree that RPN should be taught in schools, ease of parsing is not a reason to force them on everyone. Similarly, just because people get accustomed to

While I agree that RPN should be taught in schools, ease of parsing is not a reason to force them on everyone. Similarly, just because people get accustomed to lisp does not mean it's a good language. I say this as a lisp "enthusiast" using it for pretty much everything I can. Whatever language we teach in schools should be simple and quite natural to get the hang of, and should be somewhat "industry standard" if they choose to continue with said language. Python is a great candidate because of its reliance on indents and lack of delimeters. While "we" consider lisp's parenthesis incredibly useful, new programs find it scary. Forcing it on people does not make it any less scary. For me lisp wouldn't be enjoyable without good tooling. Parinfer, paredit, emacs, slynk, etc. make lisp enjoyable to use and edit. Python has the benefit of - you can quickly graphically install it - pip is incredibly easy to use, sometimes to its detriment. - you can edit python sanely in any text editor (even notepad). Perhaps a lesson in introductory lesson to hy in their compsci python classes would be nice though

dgb23 4y ago
When a Lisp is your first or one of your first languages, it’s apparently much less of a problem. Racket is probably one of the best languages to start with. Incredibly beginner friendly and complete, uniform tooling.
distcs 4y ago
> Python is a great candidate because of its reliance on indents and lack of delimeters. Really? Lack of delimiters? Python relies much more on delimiters than Lisp! Python has all kinds of delimiters for subscripting, comparison, slicing, destructuring, etc. Each one of this adds a lot of syntactic overhead while teaching Python to beginners. Whether indentation makes it easy or more difficult to learn Python is debatable. Indentation definitely makes it easy to read but beginners are learning to write code. > Python is a great candidate because of its reliance on indents and lack of delimeters. While "we" consider lisp's parenthesis incredibly useful, new programs find it scary. Forcing it on people does not make it any less scary. Can you point to some actual data or references instead of making one unfounded claim after another? Do beginners who have not been exposed to any programming language yet really find parentheses scary? Where can I see the data? I have first hand experience in teaching BASIC, Python and Lisp (actually, Scheme) to students as their first programming language. Believe it or not, in my experience they found BASIC the easiest to learn, then Lisp and Python was the hardest of the three. > you can edit python sanely in any text editor (even notepad). Spoken like an experienced programmer! For someone who is learning to program a computer for the first time, the indentation rules of Python happen to the very first thing that trips up the students. Did I indent the previous line with spaces? Or tabs? Or worse, with a mix of spaces and tabs? Notepad won't tell me and Python will refuse to run the program if I guess it wrong! Lisp has its own share of problems too. Like I said beginners find BASIC the easiest to learn but that does not make it the best language. But my experience teaching students is just that -- my experience! I am not going to go ahead and claim that my experience is a general trend. That is why I think it is important to have proper data for things like this. Might do a lot of good for future generation of programmers and teachers. Sharing personal anecdotes is fine as long as it is disclosed that they are anecdotes. But taking your anecdotes or even worse -- your beliefs from your own biases formed as an experienced programmer -- and claiming that they form some sort of general trend is disingenuous.
zrloopw 4y ago
In my opinion schools should first teach a language with goto (Basic, C), so students understand how the machine works. Basic is perfect for children. Once that is done, it makes more sense to move on to a functional language rather than an eclectic language like Python, which is mostly a collection of features that somewhat work in practice for system administration or scientific one-page scripts. There is no deeper understanding of CS to be gained from learning Python. To the contrary, it will ruin future programmers.
- marssaxman 4y ago
  > To the contrary, it will ruin future programmers. Dijkstra once said the same of Basic!
  - timbit42 4y ago
    And he was right. Look at how many BASIC programmers can't handle S-expressions.

dgb23 4y ago

When a Lisp is your first or one of your first languages, it’s apparently much less of a problem. Racket is probably one of the best languages to start with. Incredibly beginner friendly and complete, uniform tooling.

distcs 4y ago

> Python is a great candidate because of its reliance on indents and lack of delimeters. Really? Lack of delimiters? Python relies much more on delimiters than Lisp! Python has all kinds of delimiters for subscripting, comparison, slicing, destructuring, etc. Each one of this adds a lot of syntactic overhead while teaching Python to beginners. Whether indentation makes it easy or more difficult to learn Python is debatable. Indentation definitely makes it easy to read but beginners are learning to write code. > Python is a great candidate because of its reliance on indents and lack of delimeters. While "we" consider lisp's parenthesis incredibly useful, new programs find it scary. Forcing it on people does not make it any less scary. Can you point to some actual data or references instead of making one unfounded claim after another? Do beginners who have not been exposed to any programming language yet really find parentheses scary? Where can I see the data? I have first hand experience in teaching BASIC, Python and Lisp (actually, Scheme) to students as their first programming language. Believe it or not, in my experience they found BASIC the easiest to learn, then Lisp and Python was the hardest of the three. > you can edit python sanely in any text editor (even notepad). Spoken like an experienced programmer! For someone who is learning to program a computer for the first time, the indentation rules of Python happen to the very first thing that trips up the students. Did I indent the previous line with spaces? Or tabs? Or worse, with a mix of spaces and tabs? Notepad won't tell me and Python will refuse to run the program if I guess it wrong! Lisp has its own share of problems too. Like I said beginners find BASIC the easiest to learn but that does not make it the best language. But my experience teaching students is just that -- my experience! I am not going to go ahead and claim that my experience is a general trend. That is why I think it is important to have proper data for things like this. Might do a lot of good for future generation of programmers and teachers. Sharing personal anecdotes is fine as long as it is disclosed that they are anecdotes. But taking your anecdotes or even worse -- your beliefs from your own biases formed as an experienced programmer -- and claiming that they form some sort of general trend is disingenuous.

zrloopw 4y ago

In my opinion schools should first teach a language with goto (Basic, C), so students understand how the machine works. Basic is perfect for children. Once that is done, it makes more sense to move on to a functional language rather than an eclectic language like Python, which is mostly a collection of features that somewhat work in practice for system administration or scientific one-page scripts. There is no deeper understanding of CS to be gained from learning Python. To the contrary, it will ruin future programmers.

marssaxman 4y ago
> To the contrary, it will ruin future programmers. Dijkstra once said the same of Basic!
- timbit42 4y ago
  And he was right. Look at how many BASIC programmers can't handle S-expressions.