lioning

Python has always been sort of an odd language to me. Its syntax has always had a certain strong appeal to a large number of people, but there have always been these underlying performance issues that have been swept under the rug. I was surprised when it started being adopted so much in AI research because of the performance issues (I understand it's really C and other things doing the performing, but at some point you have to do something other than call C, otherwise you might as well just use C).

I do understand the appeal; I think its ergonomics are exemplary and worth being studied by language designers as a success case (if not a perfect or unique one).

Going forward, though, I'd like to see more adoption of languages like Nim, Kotlin, or Julia, that have similar levels of expressiveness but are more performant. The issues discussed in the article aren't really growing pains; they've been there from the beginning.

As former [tenured] faculty, I'm not sure what to say about this. Good luck doing it in a reasonable way. It's not like [some] universities don't try to rein in grade inflation. Instructors do regularly give out Cs and Ds or Fs at many institutions. Our university kind of did audits to just see if there was something glaringly wrong about grade distributions in courses systematically for certain courses.

Anyway, grades shouldn't be arbitrarily difficult either, or curve just to curve. That's misguided as well; there are reasons for grade inflation other than just being nice -- I think old school grading was often somewhat capriciously difficult and arbitrary which has its own downsides.

I think in my undergrad courses the average grade was usually about a B, which seemed about right to me. Of course I'm biased because it's my own grading, but these were usually upper-level students, who got to that point because they were reasonably competent, and my sense of things was that they had about a B level grasp of the material on average. That is, they understood most of the important points of the material pretty well, but might have become a little lost in the finer points. Why knock their grades down just to make the grade distributions prettier?

My experience was that the trickier part was dealing with new freshman, who didn't always seem as prepared as they should be for college, especially with writing. But it's hard to know if that's actually any different over time; there's been a couple of times I've found decades old samples and I was surprised how little things had actually changed.