Why Python is a great language for teaching introductory programming classes | Hacker News Reader

Why Python is a great language for teaching introductory programming classes

stanford.edu

26 pointsedw51925 comments

Wow! I had to re-read the second point several times before I could get it through my head: "Compile-time type errors annoy students to no end. It's better to at least let their program run and do SOMETHING rather than fail to compile and do NOTHING."

This is non-sense. It's encouraging bad coding practice, and it's the reason why languages like ColdFusion, JavaScript, etc. gave real developers so much trouble: amateurs write code that "runs" but is wholly broken. I agree that Python is a great beginner (and pro) language, but not for this reason!!

This may not fit your way of looking at this problem but please, read on.

One of the most fun things about python, or any terse loose language, is that you can now write amazingly massive amounts of code without having to do exhaustive checking as you go. For example, in C, a non-expert will often end up having to write tons of tiny functions, recompiling, and testing _constantly_ in order to avoid the hell that is having written a large chunk of code containing one tiny error and not being able to find that error even after hours of debugging.

Just the other day I reimplemented a rather large network protocol coded in C into ~1500 lines of python all at once. When it was done I decided, with some trepidation, to just run the whole thing and see what happens. It worked! Soon after, my test code did find one small type error in an obscure edge part of the code, but the good feeling from getting the immediate success didn't go away!

So the bad practice is not having tests/asserts anyway -- regardless of whether your language has type checking. He is right that just running as much as possible can be much more encouraging and even FUN, for beginners especially.

Wow! It's frightening how little people learn from history. Scheme/Lisp is much better for that use now and has been for, oh, decades. [But, then again, that's coming from a guy at that little community college on the peninsula. :-)]

It's truly sad to me that Berkeley and MIT seem to have dumped Scheme as the introductory language for the "job skills" approach of using less flexible but more popular languages.

When did Berkeley dump Scheme as the introductory language?

http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp08/

Phew! Well, at least somebody still has a clue!

Thanks for the update.

fwiw, Harvard still teaches Scheme in its introductory sequence.

So does Caltech

Yes, but the Harvard course’s treatment isn’t nearly as deep as MIT’s SICP course was, skipping most of the coolest parts, and they put it after a C course.

Being able to code fast one-offs to solve problems or automate tasks is one of the strongest reasons to get into programming in the first place. This is hugely useful in engineering for example, not just in minimum wage grunt jobs. Scheme/Lisp facilitate this VERY poorly.

Python is maps far better to how problems are commonly presented, very rarely has gotchas that would make you drag out some advanced programming construct, and has batteries included at a level which scheme/lisp may NEVER catch up with:)

All of the world is not calculus! Spend all your time playing in that area and you won't become a very well rounded or capable programmer/engineer.

Indeed. That's why I'm totally an advocate for a requirement for a concurrent track that's all about installing/configuring/administration of computers/networks with an automation (i.e., shell scripting, tool development, etc.) focus.

It seems that you're still implying that python is only good enough for lowly sysadmin tasks?

Where did you get that ridiculous notion?

There's a serious problem with how people learning languages... their exposure to their first language has a strong tendency to color their thinking (read: biases) towards/against other languages for the rest of their careers.

Another serious problem is that students end up with very distorted views of what "programming" is by getting only one narrow view of the how things work. Some curricula are over-focused on the abstract, "math" side of the field while others are stuck on the basic engineering side. There's not only a need for both but also the very hands-on administration/operations side precisely so that people get a much more well-rounded experience of the entire picture.

MIT’s intro CS course (using python) doesn’t strike me as particularly “job skills” targeted. Care to explain?

At my university they teach you ML as the first language. It's a pretty cold start, but I think it's worth it.

Good points. One that's not really mentioned is that beginning CS students often want to start learning a language that will make them employable, right away. (Or, their parents want them to.) I know professors get a lot of pressure to teach Java instead of, say, Scheme or ML. Python offers a way out of that, by leaving room in the language for illustrating different CS concepts clearly, but also dangling that carrot of employability -- see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=181676.

I think this is one of the best points for Python as a teaching language. It's not just approachable, it's also practical. I think most of the positive points mentioned here also apply to Ruby.

Ruby requires you to understand OO to understand the language. While every CS student eventually needs to understand OO, it's not something I would want to explain in the first lecture.

For that reason, I agree with the article that Python (or Scheme) is a good starting language. You can start with nothing, and add concepts until you understand the whole language. You don't need to know programming before you can understand "hello world".

(Amusingly, I don't really like Python or Scheme, but I do like Perl and CL. I'm not sure what that says about my personality, but I'm sure it's something :)

What's so mysterious about puts "hello, world"? I think you have a mistaken impression of Ruby.

You have to explain what "hello, world".puts does.

It throws a NoMethodError, because strings don't have that method. And you can introduce that kind of syntax at roughly the same time you'd have to in Python.

here's something related: http://okasaki.blogspot.com/2008/02/in-praise-of-mandatory-i...

(re: indentation-sensitive languages for teaching)

There's a difference between "mandatory indentation" (good!) and what Python does. I wrote a rant on this subject: http://www.hackerdashery.com/2006/09/close-block-delimiter-s...

that's actually my opinion. i like the punctuation of closing symbols. my brain doesn't have to think about anything, it just sees "end" and that's that

Your rant is rather silly, but if you'd like to know about the colon at the end of blocks:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2000-December/0...

If you really want a close block delimiter, python is happy to oblige. Just spell it `#end`. ;-)

Interesting that many of the reasons listed for beginning programmers could actually apply to all programmers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com