Experiences/guidance on teaching Python as a first programming language

[Conor Hughes]

Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> writes:

> A few years ago, MIT switched from Scheme (which I believe originated
> at MIT) to Python for its first course. There might faculty blogs
> discussing the reasons. In any case, the course is one of MIT's free
> online offerings.

Berkeley recently made the same transition. They had been mirroring the
MIT Scheme-based 6.001 quite closely; I believe the Python-based
replacement at Berkeley doesn't concern itself with tracking the new
6.001 at MIT. In any case, much (read: some) ink was spilled and
consternation felt about the transition, but all in all my impression
was that it went OK. IMHO, if you're going to switch from Scheme to
something else for first-time programmers, Python is quite nice, as it
reads exceptionally well and is very close to pseudocode in
appearance sometimes. Of course, given that I didn't learn on Python,
my opinions may be colored by prior experience.