My son wants me to teach him Python

[rusi]

On Jun 13, 12:46 am, John Ladasky <john_lada... at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> My son is 17 years old.  He just took a one-year course in web page design at his high school.  HTML is worth knowing, I suppose, and I think he has also done a little Javascript.  He has expressed an interest in eventually wanting to program 3D video games.
>
> For that purpose, HTML and Javascript are too limited.  I hardly consider either one to be a real programming language.  I want to get him started with a real applications programming language -- Python, of course.  And he's ready to learn.  OK, so it's not necessarily a fast enough language for the epic video games he envisions, but it's a darn good start.  I'll tax his brain with a compiled language like C at some other time.
>
> He's a smart kid, but prefers to be shown, to be tutored, rather than having the patience to sit down and RTFM.  Have any of you been down this road before?  I would appreciate it if you would share your experiences, or provide resource material.
>
> Thanks!

Some views of mine (controversial!).

Python is at least two things, a language and a culture.
As a language its exceptionally dogma-neutral.
You can do OO or FP, throwaway one-off scripts or long-term system
building etc

However as a culture it seems to prefer the OO style to the FP style.
This is unfortunate given that OO is on the down and FP is on a rise.
Some thoughts re OOP: http://blog.languager.org/2012/07/we-dont-need-no-ooooo-orientation-4.html

So my suggestion is use some rigorous FPL like Haskell to learn/teach
programming.
After that you can switch to python or some other realistic language.

Note: I have some serious reservations regarding Haskell
http://blog.languager.org/2012/08/functional-programming-philosophical.html
Nevertheless it seems to be the best there is at the moment.

tl;dr: Haskell is in 2013 what Pascal was in 1970 -- good for
programming pedagogy.