New to Python: Features

[Alex Martelli]

Richard Blackwood <richardblackwood at cloudthunder.com> wrote:
   ...
> >course covered basic concepts, and as "homework" assignments each
> >student had to choose some language and produce a 20-30min report (yes,
> >we had to present them to the rest of the class).
   ...
> Really?  Well, I never took computer science so I guess I wouldn't 
> exactly know.  What's the point of making them write a report?

Testing skills about doing biblio research, summarizing findings
thereof, presenting them -- skills which will be crucial to their
professional lives, and thus ones they should be encouraged to hone and
practice.  I got lot of that in high school (it _was_ a rather elite
one) and a little in university (mostly in electives such as Operations
Research and the like).

The point isn't so much that I remember more about the Roman "cursus
honorum", the contrasting visions of science practice in Comte, Engels
and Heisenberg, or alpha-beta pruning and variants thereof, than if I
had them spoon-fed to me -- none of these areas really made any money
for me in 25 years of professional practice.  It's the meta-skill of
researching some field and reporting on it which _did_ stand me in good
stead throughout this time, notwithstanding the huge technological
changes in the underlying infrastructure (I haven't had to read a spool
of microfilm in 30 years or more, and Google's FAR easier to use than
any library catalog ever was... but the overall mental skill of
researching, digesting, and synthesizing right back in summary form, is
still very much the same!).


Alex