Python too complex ?!?!?!

[Aaron Watters]

On Nov 19, 1:41 am, MonkeeSage <MonkeeS... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On the other hand, C# and .NET seems like a lot of baggage to bring to
> the table. First off, you have to introduce the CLR and how it relates
> to C#, then you have to deal with all the public, private, etc,
> syntaxis for constructors/destructors. I don't see how anyone could
> claim that C# is simpler to teach than python. I mean, (non-PC
> statement follows), it's easier to teach retarded, blind children to
> recite the lord's prayer backwards, in sign language, than it is to
> get a working .net environment set up for actual use w/o installing
> the latest visual studio. And not everyone had five-million dollars
> (or a corporate license) to get the latest and greatest VS.

You've got some good points that are not
necessarily the case any more.  The free
version of Visual Studio from MSFT installs
with no problems as far as I can tell,
especially on recent Windows OS's.  The
extra complexity of "static public void Main()..."
&c is scary and confusing, but you can just tell
the students to "ignore that stuff for now."
You don't have to talk about the CLR at all;
the students naturally take it for granted.
In VS when you start typing something,
VS makes a pretty good guess what you are
trying to do and offers to complete it for you
-- which would be really nice to have in
Python (and unavailable afaik, at least at
that level of sophistication).  When you make
a syntax or type error you get a red squiggly
underline, and so forth.

On the other hand I still think that the Python
interactive interpreter is the coolest thing
about Python for beginners.  It's the only
language I know where you could seriously
start introducing basic concepts of strings,
hash tables, and arrays (lists/tuples) in the
first hour or so to students below MIT
level of preparation.  This is primarily because the
interactive interpreter and Python's nice
syntax make everything so accessible.  In C#
you might get into arrays or strings in week 3+
and hash tables and other scary things would
probably wait for the second course.

IronPython anyone?  (btw, what's up with IronPython?)

  -- Aaron Watters

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