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by lelanthran 23 days ago
> Why not python? It's pretty simple for kids to understand.

Not for the book type format - the kids will be typing the code in, not copying + pasting them.

Significant whitespace is a killer in printed form; so Python is not even in the running.
1 comments
egypturnash 23 days ago
[picture of Tips Kitty] Don't forget! Every time you see " ⦙ " in the listing, press the [Tab] key on your keyboard. See page 23 to learn why this is important.

And page 23 teaches you about significant whitespace, and how to configure several text editors that a kid's likely to have available to actually show it like that. Heck, I use Panic's Nova for my text editing and it does that out of the box with no configuration needed.

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lelanthran 23 days ago
> [picture of Tips Kitty] Don't forget! Every time you see " ⦙ " in the listing, press the [Tab] key on your keyboard. See page 23 to learn why this is important.

I don't think you actually used those books :-/

No one linearly writes code, from the start of the file to the end; they edit it. They move blocks around if they missed a page, they navigate around putting in missing if statements and removing incorrectly-added loops. Those programs were very much not one-and-done, they were heavily modified by the kids.

Your proposal of "Tell them to configure their editor for Python" and "add in unicode symbols to represent whitespace" is the exact opposite of what those books were about.

The books were about removing superfluous barriers, not adding them! Using Python would result in a whole lot of incidental complexity for literally no gain.

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egypturnash 23 days ago
I never used the Usborne books because I was a US kid but I sure typed in a lot of stuff from books and magazines for my c64, often while modifying it on the fly. And dealing with accidentally skipped pages. And went on to learn assembly language.
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redwall_hp 23 days ago
Python is also already all over the Raspberry Pi and MicroPython/CircuitPython spheres, so there's an easy road into SBCs and microcontrollers.

Education has already chosen Python as the preferred language for this sort of thing. It has some unfortunate bits, but it's certainly a more ergonomic language than BASIC. Counting tabs is less arduous than messing with line numbers and GOSUB.

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Symbiote 22 days ago
The modern Usborne book uses Python.

https://usborne.com/row/books/browse-by-category/science-and...

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