Comments requested: brief summary of Python

Josiah Carlson jcarlson at nospam.uci.edu
Tue Feb 24 12:05:41 EST 2004


> The target audience here is an experience programmer that doesn't know
> Python at all. So I didn't want to assume they knew about indenting,
> or how lists work, etc.

In general, not just the Python description, but the three language 
descriptions I read (Python, Perl, C), all sounded like they were going 
to be given to a CEO who knew how to use formulas in Excel, not to 
anyone with real programming experience.

Each version felt very much like you were holding someone's hand. 
Moosebumps made a good suggestion to offer a short program, and describe 
it as you go along.  In languages where you can insert a comment 
virtually anywhere, you could document the code, describing the syntax 
and features of the languages as you go along.  For those additional 
language features (like lists, tuples, dicts, etc. in Python, and other 
in other languages), having a section at the end describing the basic 
(and advanced) data structures available to the language, seems to make 
sense to me.

  - Josiah



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