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Teaching python (programming) to children

Brian Elmegaard brian at rk-speed-rugby.dk
Wed Nov 7 04:19:39 EST 2001 
Cliff Wells <logiplexsoftware at earthlink.net> writes:

> On Tuesday 06 November 2001 15:07, David Andreas Alderud wrote:
> 
> > Having a non-declarative language as a first choice is bad, teaches them to
> > write sloppy code.
> 
> Yes and no.  Like many others, my first language was BASIC (on an
> Apple //e).  Mine too on Commodore 64 .  > Later, I took some CS
> classes where we learned Pascal.  I had indeed > developed some bad
>habits due to language deficiencies in BASIC (everything > global, no
>argument passing, jumping in and out of routines, etc).  However, > it
>was a good, simple introduction to programming and I like to think I >
>wasn't permanently crippled by the experience.

Me too.

> That depends upon your perspective on what "good code" is.  Code
> that is easy to read?  Easy to modify?  One of Python's strengths is
> that almost every line of code is related to solving the
> programmer's goal rather than telling the compiler how to compile
> the code.  Not having a lot of extra statements that have nothing to
> do with solving the problem results in cleaner, easier to understand
> code.

Exactly, you don't have to do it perfectly, when you start learning
how to do it. In schools nowadays you are awarded for a cribbled,
backwards, upside-down G, the first day and is punished for it two
years after. I believe this must be the way you should teach
programming, too. No reason to worry about all the perfectionist stuff
at first.


-- 
Brian (remove the sport for mail)
http://www.rk-speed.dk http://fiduso.dk http://sunsite.auc.dk/dk-tug
\TeX, tak.
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