Teaching python (programming) to children

[David Andreas Alderud]

> > Python is without doubt a very good language, but it's not good for the
> > beginner because they will pick up bad practices, mostly because of the
> > loose type paradigm.
>
> And what bad practices would those be?

Having a non-declarative language as a first choice is bad, teaches them to
write sloppy code.
Having dynamically typed language such as Python does even more damage to
the understanding of how to write good code, thankfully python types are
strong which helps to avoid part of the problem.

> > For teaching programming I strongly belive that Ada95 is by far the best
>
> Ugh. At least teach them something that they can use elsewhere. ;-)

Ada is used quite a lot, especially in the military and general embeded
markets, and it's a gigant in realtime system programming.
Ada is fantastic, with it I write inline Assembly(can even do inline
Fortran, C, C++, etc, etc), combine it with Python, Java, etc, etc.

> > teaches the students how to write good code
>
> Define "good" code, please.

Ada is very strict, so sloppy code is very rare, sloppy written code is bad
code, because it's hard to maintain, debug and extend.
Ada a high level OO language that still remains close to hardware, while
code is still portable across platforms, what more can you ask for?

People underestimate Ada95 because they either don't know jack about Ada or
just know Ada83, use the right tool for the right job, you can after all use
Ada with Python. :-)