[dsego]

She understands function on a theoretical level. But keep in mind, she knows nothing about the cpu and jump commands. So, there was no intuition about functions being pieces of code being stashed somewhere for later use. That the interpreter would read a call and jump to that piece of code and send arguments to it. Instead, she developed her own theory of the interpreter reading a function definition and searching for calls in the code. The book did nothing to develop a healthy intuition about the flow of the program.

From the book:

> Learning logic has to come after you do some memorization. I want you to do this exercise for an entire week. (http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ex27.html)

Why would you need to memorize that not true == false? All of the others can be deduced by simple reasoning. One example:

    not (True and False)
    True and False is False
    not (False) is True

Instead of teaching people this (basic algebra), he recommends spending a week memorizing stupid tables?

The same thing with spending first ten chapters having people write print statements with convoluted string interpolations. String interpolation is a hard concept to grasp for beginners. Unpacking variables before learning about objects, introducing what he calls "commands" like raw_input(), before even mentioning functions. I could go on and on.

[ForHackernews]

I see what you're getting at, but when you're talking about a high-level language like Python your comments about the CPU and jump commands seem really off-topic. You don't need to know anything CPU instructions or memory management to write competent Python (because that's all handled automatically) and knowing about them doesn't necessarily help you have a better intuitive understanding of Python code (because again, lots of stuff is happening under the hood automatically).