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Comment by aidos | Hacker News Reader

I'm taking a Coursera course at the moment where a lot of people on the forums are new to Python. I've been trying to guide them in the right direction in terms of the Pythonic way of doing things which has been a very interesting experience. Lots of people turning to for loops 5 levels deep (or even worse - wrapping 5 for loops in a list comprehension).

This is a typical quote:

"I'm still a little bummed that python doesn't have the for(;;) C syntax"

I'm pleased to report that quite a few people have been impressed with how clean and simple the code is once they see the Python way.

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My girlfriend is taking the python course with them as well. She said there were 60,000 in total taking it (sounds like there will be a lot of new Pythonists in 2013).

She and another friend of hers was having some troubles understanding when and when not to use parentheses and I did a quick clinic with them to walk through it.

It might be a good idea if volunteers from the Python community could be found to offer extra lessons, perhaps some sort of live video cast mixed with a live chat. It could help out a lot of people who otherwise don't have many people to call on around them.

Cool - which course is she taking? This is the Computational Investing course. Buried very deep in a forum is a post by the tutor saying that you should know programming and how to use the command line - unfortunately it's too well hidden.

The main struggle has actually been with people on OSX Lion getting the libraries installed.

https://www.coursera.org/course/compinvesting1

On the introduction page of this course it states, "This course is intended for folks who have a strong programming background, but who are new to finance and investing."

Hardly well-hidden.

I stand corrected. Maybe there should be a test to weed people out early then. Dunno - there are a few too many people on the forums who don't know the 'cd' command.

I was referring to this little quiz [1] which I thought should be posted directly in the description to scare people off.

[1] http://wiki.quantsoftware.org/index.php?title=Compinvesti-pr...

Definitely a bit more computationally intensive than I would have imagined it to be. That's a bit of a challenge even for some with a CS degree!

Cheers for pointing this course out, though. It's right up my street.

Great! Very interesting stuff (as it's all new to me).

She's doing the 'Learn to Program: The Fundamentals' course run by U of T. I'm glad she did as it's forcing me to use Python 3 :)

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