Conversation
Notices
-
Java is universally recognized as a poor choice for retention of new CS students, esp. those less confident. Python's recommended #ghc10
- Rob Myers, Christopher Allan Webber, Shashi Gowda and Osama Khalid like this.
-
@robmyers Why Scheme over Common Lisp?
-
@robmyers I think lisp is an amazing language, esp for understanding how coding *works*, but python is easier to "read" for new coders
-
@cwebber Why Common Lisp over Scheme?
-
@robmyers Though I do think every programmer should learn lisp! (And actually, lisp is the first language I *really* learned..)
-
@lunpa Scheme is much more minimalist, Common Lisp has more "batteries included", etc
-
@cwebber Simpler. I prefer CL for my own code.
-
@cwebber Lisp has one syntactic construct, Python has n. Much easier to read Lisp. ;-) #smuglispweenie
-
@robmyers Ah :). I've noticed many educational materials for lisp tend to emphasize recursion over iteration, doesn't help new coders
-
@robmyers Yes, one symantic construct that looks nothing like language as non-programmers are used to seeing ;)
-
@cwebber (That's not lisp's fault though... that's the educational materials)
-
@cwebber Yeah that's silly. They should use dolist, map, etc.
-
@cwebber That sounds like an argument in favor of both languages.
-
@cwebber Why yes, when I first saw C I thought "my goodness, it's just like written English" .;-)
-
Actually, I mostly came to understand programming by extending emacs w/ emacs lisp (I had a very poor C programming understanding before)
-
@robmyers HA. Well I never, ever advocated learning C first ;)
-
@lunpa Yes, those are the arguments for both languages, in fact! ;)
-
@cwebber I mean dialects.
-
@cwebber I think Lua is even betterer runnable pseudocode than Python...
-
@robmyers Python is above and beyond that stage now surely
-
Blaise Alleyne likes this.
-
@robmyers I agree, xcept sandboxing plays against it in education. The large number of libraries make you able to "do things" w/ python fast
-
@robmyers If there were say, a good general purpose game engine or something that was lua scriptable, that could be a good coding motivator
-
Urgh. Flashbacks from a Lisp module at university. The most horrible horrible thing. I had nightmares about parenthasese.
-
@cwebber Processing has a similar problem. Once you want to use it in anger, the training wheels get in the way. Edu. Python == real Python.
-
@cwebber Yes, not WoW. ;-)
-
@eximious my intro to CS class is using python. so far so good.
-
@robmyers Someone did recommend Processing. My Intro to CS class had us start with Scratch to get us warmed up to loops and if's.
-
@sdubois Nice! How are you liking it so far?
-
@eximious so far so good, it's starting to get pretty difficult though
-
@robmyers so soon after having this convo, I discover CubeCreate (@kripken -blessed syntensity fork) will be switching from JS->lua
All Identi.ca content and data are available under the