|
Python has it's place. When teaching kids, I guess it comes down to two things - are you targeting the lowest barrier to entry to make something whiz-bang to appeal to the largest common denominator of "I use Facebook so I'd like to make 'computer things'", in which case, alright they can install Tampermonkey and mess with a really inconsistent language like Ecmascript5[1] then spend a lot of time explaining things like the DOM and how to traverse it, then the issue of how to manipulate certain things (what do if getElementByName isn't working because someone decided to not properly tag things?), followed by now we have to teach them CSS so they actually can alter the aesthetics or worse, teach them JS so can actually add functionality (which involves all of the ES5 shims and a huge confusing ecosystem that even people in the industry like us have to spend tons of time working on). On the other hand Python can be installed with one binary on Macs, Windows, and Linux with 300 packages and an IDE[1] and they'll be able to use it with the Excel spreadsheets down the road which they'll inevitably have to deal with if they're the average white-collar office worker. (See: http://xlwings.org/ and say goodbye to VBA). The large majority of people will actually use Excel on a regular basis and if their job involves reconciling a lot of semi-structured data, as it frequently occurs with my friends in the social sciences or other non-CS fields, they'll largely benefit from Python. Not only that but after having a core Python knowledge, with the same Anaconda package, you'll be able to make your own QT-native crossplatform full GUI binaries with an 'import PySide' or write your own 'web apps' with equal ease. If your goal is to maximize the performance of your students in international competitive programming competitions, then you should be teaching them out of Competitive Programming and Steve Skeina's book so they recognize what category the problem falls into (it's usually one of 5 or 6), along with C++ plus the standard C++ libraries that everyone uses that loads in GMP, makes matrix manipulation easy, etc. If your goal is to cater to the guys to teach fundamentals to those who are going to matriculate into the CS uni path, then both are wrong and you should be teaching out of something like the SICP from the 'top down' and something like ML from the 'bottom up'. [1] https://www.continuum.io/downloads if you don't like Anaconda, there are a boatload of competitors like https://python-xy.github.io/ that come with Spyder, which I think we both will agree offers a better development experience than Tampermonkey. |
What was actually annotated as [1] in the end-notes should have been annotated as [2] with the proper link. The "IDE[1]" annotation should be altered to "IDE[2]".