an abomination, pure and simple.
I've talked with him about this choice and he has a lot of sound reasons for making this move backed by his years of experience teaching in various languages.
What's your line of thought? I use Clojure many hours every day and while I think that LISP languages are awesome, I don't think they're a good choice for a 1st programming course either.
The best time to learn about different paradigms is right when you're starting out; if you basically only learn how to program imperatively, you're liable to start believing that that's the only way to go. I know because this happened to me (I was self-taught and learned a different set of languages, but it had the same effect); ultimately it took me longer to come to and start using functional programming properly than it would have had I learned about it at the very beginning.
I can confirm that moving to Python was a very well-reasoned decision. Having TA'd the Scheme version of the same course 2 or 3 times, I can say that for all talk of Scheme having very simple syntax, it's surprisingly hard for students to get used to.
- The code is hard to read, and, a humans, we're not built for nested expressions.
- Useful data structures, like key-value stores, and indexable lists, are limited, or introduced late
- Having recursion thrown at you in week 1, before you've learned basic debugging, the concept of abstraction, or how to write readable code, gets in the way of learning to program.
- Almost nobody uses scheme.
That might be your value. But, the goal of SICP class is not to teach functional programming or create fpfs.
What's an fpfs?
In [2] the solution given by yairchu can be written succinctly via generators, which look extremely like a mathematical set definition.
def grandKids(generation, kidsFunc, val):
return reduce(lambda a, v: (x for v in a for x in kidsFunc(v)), xrange(generation), [val])
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1017621/why-isnt-python-v... [2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1016997/generate-from-gen...
What you have done there is cute and commendable as a mental exercise, but if i'd ever encounter that in production code someone would make a close encounter with my chainsaw. This is basically undebuggable (i don't know the line/statement debuggers python has available, so i'm guessing here at what happens) because either the debugger will step over that in one step because it's one statement, or it'll just keep stepping on the same line again and again which is also entirely useless.
Lastly, what you did there is basically golf the living hell out of that code to bring it down from multiple statement lines to a single one. If i have to reach to such means i might as well use Perl. Only Perl actually does allow me to put multiple statement subs into a lambda, so i don't have to golf there.
Weird days when i have to golf in Python but don't need to in Perl.