Teaching Programming

[Samuel Williams]

Dear Chris,

I will take your feedback into consideration and let you know the outcome when I have time to think about it.

Again, I appreciate your thoughts. Thanks for taking the time to think about the comparison chart.

Kind regards,
Samuel

On 4/05/2010, at 1:58 AM, Chris Rebert wrote:

>> I appreciate that in general the Python syntax is good and concise. It is hard. Some teacher might want to consider these issues more carefully. Do you think I should change that spot to green? I don't have a problem with doing that, as long as it makes sense.
> 
> Yes, I do think it ought to be green, though I admit I'm not unbiased
> on this. I will point out that (1) does not seem related to
> "simplicity and conciseness", which is what that row in the comparison
> claims to be about.
> 
>> With regards to Perl, yes, this is probably something I need to investigate further. It is not always easy to do a comparison of this nature. From my experience, Perl generally seems to have a robust object model that is consistently implemented (even if the syntax is pretty wonky at times). However, in a sense, it is no better or worse than Python implementation... so why is it green dot? Do you think I should change Perl to orange or Python to green.
> 
> I'm unsure, but in either case, at least based on my limited knowledge
> of Perl 5, it again seems rather strange for Python & Perl to not be
> rated approximately the same in this area (if anything, I'd think Perl
> might be slightly worse off due to its syntax; but again, I'm not
> unbiased and my Perl knowledge is limited).