My son wants me to teach him Python

[Joshua Landau]

On 13 June 2013 17:50, Tomasz Rola <rtomek at ceti.pl> wrote:
> Of course kids are more interesting in things painted on
> screen, especially if they are colorful, move and make
> sounds at that. The next step would be a simple,
> interactive game.
>
> Which is why I would synthesize something neat yet
> simple from http://processing.org/tutorials/
>
> Python is overkill for a kid. Ugh. Some people have just
> no common sense at all.

As someone who can only recently claim to be "not a kid", I will again
do my duty and counter this point.

GUI is boring. I don't give a damn about that. If I had it my way, I'd
never write any interfaces again (although designing them is fine).
Console interaction is faster to do and it lets me do the stuff I
*want* to do quicker.

Also - Python is pretty much the only language that *isn't* overkill;
once you take more than the first few steps a language that's
*consistent* will help more with learning, á mon avis, than these
"quicker" languages ever will. Python is consistent and simple.

Then, when you're better and you do want to do cool stuff,
Cython/occasionally PyPy/Numpy/Numba etc. let you get C-like speeds
learning no other languages at all (although you do need to get C
types down). That's the easy way out, not
Python-then-C-because-Python-is-slow or some nonsense like that.

Basically, "kid" is a *very* generic term and there are people who
like GUIs and there are people who like internals and there are
hundreds of other classifiers from all over the globe. Please don't
conflate groups if you can help it, as it's often just wrong.