Lies in education [was Re: The "loop and a half"]

[Bill]

Rhodri James wrote:
> On 09/10/17 20:06, Stefan Ram wrote:
>> ram at zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) writes:
>>> Steve D'Aprano <steve+python at pearwood.info> writes:
>>>> At various stages of education, we teach many lies-to-children, 
>>>> including:
>>> Many of those lies can be perfectly true in some sense.
>>> I pick some examples:
>>
>>    Another noun phrase with "lie" is "white lie".
>>
>>    In his book about programming, Bjarne Stroustrup writes:
>>
>> |We try hard to avoid "white lies"; that is, we refrain from
>> |oversimplified explanations that are clear and easy to
>> |understand, but not true in the context of real languages and
>> |real problems.
>
> That would go a long way to explaining why I tried and failed to learn 
> C++ three times from Stroustrup's books.
>
He is surely one of the best authors in computer science (at least based 
upon "The C++ Programming Language", 3rd ed.).  He indicates that he 
assumes that the reader has some experience developing serious 
software.  Beazley's, "Python: Essential Reference" is one of the best 
books I've seen since. It doesn't have the same depth, but it (too) 
provides articulate answers, head-on. Both books have 5-star rankings on 
Amazon.com. That doesn't mean that either of them is right for 
everybody. Come back to Stroustrup's book "after" you learn C++ 
somewhere else, and maybe you'll enjoy it more.

Bill