[Edu-sig] Code to Joy in The Economist (June/July 2018)

[Nicholas H.Tollervey]

Kirby,

Thank you for your kind words.

Andrew has just signed a book deal to be delivered in about a year's 
time. His task: to write about what it's like to learn to code. We're 
regularly in touch via email, he's "up for it" (as we say in Britain) 
and sponge-like in his desire to learn about coding, Python and the 
culture that surrounds it. He's also looking at other languages too 
(perhaps C/C++).

My hope is he'll demolish some of the toxic and exclusory stereotypes 
and behaviours associated with coding. I hope he'll celebrate some of 
the progress we, in the Python community, have worked so hard to bring 
about in this respect. I hope he'll hold us to account as "the fifth 
estate", as he calls us in the Economist piece. He gets that coding is 
both moral and political in nature.

He's clever, funny and writes extraordinarily clear and witty prose. He 
tells a great story too (I've read both his other books). I'm looking 
forward to reading what he has to say.

Best wishes,

N.

On 02/06/18 21:13, kirby urner wrote:
> 
> 
> One of my screen scraper friends (always reading) just forwarded this link:
> 
> https://www.1843magazine.com/features/code-to-joy
> 
> A highly literate middle aged writer tackles programming from zero and 
> winds up in Python after a pilgrimmage through Javascript, and uses the 
> Twitter API.  He meditates on what learning to code might mean to a 
> fully developed adult such as himself (connects to Andragogy **).
> 
> Nicholas Tollervey, sometime edu-sig poster and Micro:bit avatar, is 
> very much a hero in this story, living up to the ideal of a Pythonista as
> 
> (A) not religiously dogmatic (re "language wars") yet
> (B) having enthusiasm for sharing Python (without too much proselytizing).
> 
> Bravo on a stellar performance!
> 
> Quincy Larson of freeCodeCamp fame is another champion of openness and 
> accessibility (and good advice).  I get his emails in my inbox with 
> gratitude, though I don't follow all the links (helpfully labeled with 
> estimated reading times, for my internal scheduler -- thanks for the 
> meta-data!).
> 
> In the interests of sparking some edu-sig type discussion (this could 
> fork to a new thread), the author Andrew Smith writes:
> 
> "Variables are best (if imperfectly) understood as the vessels within 
> which pieces of data are contained, ready to be worked on. Of many 
> possible data types, the most straightforward are numbers and strings, 
> string being the name given to text."
> 
> In my classes I readily acknowledge the "variable as container" metaphor 
> is apt, and agree that Python objects take up memory and so object == 
> container (with id) is OK too.
> 
> However, the name --> object mapping of a namespace is better imagined 
> as "luggage tag -> suitcase" relationship. It's not like the Python name 
> itself is the container on the heap.
> 
> The object in memory is a possibly fat heavy suitcase, stuffed with 
> stuff (e.g. an HttpResponse).  However the name is more a label, like a 
> luggage tag on a suitcase (and this is the point).
> 
> Name : Object :: Luggage Tags :: Suitcase
> 
> One suitcase (object) may have many names (connects to garbage 
> collection discussion).  However at any one moment, a name points to 
> only one object (the same name in different modules, both running, still 
> count as different names -- scope matters).
> 
> So yeah, the object itself is a "container" but what it contains may be 
> tags to other objects.
> 
> Without this separation of "names" from "objects" there's an inevitable 
> tendency to imagine copies, as how can we have two bowls or boxes with 
> exactly the same content.
> 
> We don't have a visual metaphor for "two suitcases containing exactly 
> the same clothes at the same time".
> 
> But we do understand "one suitcase having two or more luggage tags."
> 
> Surely we have two copies, albeit clones of the same thing.  Not so in 
> Python though.  Python is biased against making gratuitous copies of 
> anything.  Keep is spare! (sparse if possible).  Don't clutter memory 
> with excessive redundancy.
> 
> 
> Kirby
> 
> **
> http://4dsolutions.net/presentations/pycon2013.pdf
> 
> 
> 
> 
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