My son wants me to teach him Python

[Tomasz Rola]

On Thu, 13 Jun 2013, rusi wrote:

> 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.
[...]
> 
> Some views of mine (controversial!).

Not really :-)

> 
> 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.

If he (son) learns Haskell, he may as well stay with it, because it's 
quite decent lang as far as I can tell. And it's compiled, too.

I would also consider Racket, which is a Scheme superset. It too, comes 
with compiler/JIT, plus IDE, plus libraries plus I understand examples 
from "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", 
( http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ ) can be run on it. I have heard some 
folks are doing real life stuff with it, too and IDE might help beginner a 
lot (this one is very nice, not just magnified editor).

> 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.

Mee too! For this reason I am exploring Ocaml and SML.

Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **