tough-to-explain Python

[Paul Moore]

2009/7/8 kj <no.email at please.post>:
> There is this
> persistent idea "out there" that programming is a very accessible
> skill, like cooking or gardening, anyone can do it, and even profit
> from it, monetarily or otherwise, etc., and to some extent I am
> actively contributing to this perception by teaching this course
> to non-programmers (experimental biologists to be more precise),
> but maybe this idea is not entirely true...  Maybe, to get past
> the most amateurish level, one has to, one way or another, come
> face-to-face with bits, compilers, algorithms, and all the rest
> that real computer scientists learn about in their formal training...

Look at it another way. Experimental biologists don't want to program,
they want to use computers to do experimental biology. It's a tool,
and they (quite reasonably) don't *care* about robustness,
portability, etc. Or even about programming, to be honest.

In the context of the original question, it's entirely reasonable (in
my view) to tell this audience "if the code does something weird you
don't understand, either ignore it and find another way or dig into
the manuals and experiment if you care". They'd very quickly find a =
a + b as a less confusing alternative to a += b. (As has been pointed
out earlier, to some extent a += b is quite an advanced construct -
after all, it's essentially an optimisation of a = a + b).

Biologists don't expect me to understand their discipline before I can
plant seeds in my garden, after all. (And when I do plant seeds, I
usually get far more surprising results than I could get from a += b
:-))

Paul.