Python in education

Posted Jul 30, 2015 16:47 UTC (Thu) by dashesy (guest, #74652)
Parent article: Python in education

Make IDLE better?! It is one scary-looking application for us adults, it has absolutely no educational value to offer, no one uses it but perhaps its esteemed developers. Just hide it under the rug, make sure its shortcuts do not end up on someone's desktop first time they install Python and hopefully they install bpython, or *any* other great tool for learning Python (there are many to choose from). Tools matter, and first impressions matter more. Use iPython, or even better! open iPython Notebook/Julia in a browser.

Python in education

Posted Jul 30, 2015 21:59 UTC (Thu) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link] (1 responses)

Was somebody coding in something other than Emacs? O_o

Python in education

Posted Jul 31, 2015 2:24 UTC (Fri) by dashesy (guest, #74652) [Link]

Have you used IDLE for anything more than 3 lines? It is there just to be battery-included, like when one buys a PC it comes with Windows, then most sensible people immediately install Fedora/Debian on it :)
I learned how to program in a GWBasic editor that I had to use 150: to add a line between 100: and 200: because it could not insert a line. We have long passed the time computers had to be tolerated. I do not believe the current generation has had a boost in patience to learn. iPython/Jupiter is just superior and is as FOSS as it can get, so why not?

Python in education

Posted Aug 1, 2015 4:46 UTC (Sat) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (2 responses)

The article makes it seem like Ruby is the answer to all this teacher's problems. So, why bother with Python at all? It is a deeply weird language (except when compared to Perl).

Maybe we need a non-weird language that can call into Python libraries, for power, via automatically generated references.

Python in education

Posted Aug 6, 2015 16:26 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

A snippet of an API that looks like the output from a C library wrapper generator (even if it possibly isn't), a mention of Ruby with a conveniently-formulated code fragment, and now Ruby "is the answer"? I doubt it. You could write something cleaner in a functional language like one from the ML family, but I doubt that would be the answer, either.

And actually, I do see the merit of a simplified, cleaner dialect of Python. But I regard "deeply weird" as something of an exaggeration to say the least, even with my discomfort about Python's recent evolution.

Python in education

Posted Nov 25, 2022 14:33 UTC (Fri) by Benzo_1Slurry (guest, #162364) [Link]

I agree, that's so boring language