Python too complex ?!?!?!

[John J. Lee]

"Chris Mellon" <arkanes at gmail.com> writes:
[...]
> These modules exist, but aren't that common. Certainly anything you're
> likely to be using in an introductory compsci course is well packaged.
> And even if it's not, it's really not that hard to create packages or
> installers - a days work of course prep would take care of the
> potential problem.

"A day's worth of course prep" for beginners would let them debug all
the crap that building MySQLdb on Windows might throw at them, for
example?  I think not! (MySQLdb, last time I looked, was one of the
not-so-obscure modules that don't have a Windows installer available
and kept up to date.  Maybe it does now, but that's not really the
point.)

I certainly don't recognise what some people have been saying, though.
It's a rare thing that I have any real pain installing a Python module
on Linux.  That's not to say you don't need some background knowledge
about distributions and Python if doing it "by hand", of course
(rather than with a packaging tool like apt-get).  Occasionally you'll
want the newest version of something, which will in turn occasionally
get you into some grim automake issue or similar.  But all of this can
be entirely avoided in an introductory course -- simply restrict
yourself to what can be installed with apt-get (if the instructor
feels they *must* make some new library available, they can always
package it themselves).


John