Python/New/Learn

[Avi Gross]

This topic has rapidly shifted over way beyond Python even as the original person has not returned to participate.

There are many ways to teach anything and since the classical method was to learn in person from someone using mainly sound or pantomime, it has hung on. Even with the existence of writing, books were made one at a time and were rare.

In more recent times, the norm shifted gradually from lectures to individuals and groups to include textbooks and illustrations and eventually recordings or PowerPoint Slides with animation.

Realistically, learning some things on your own is easy enough but for many people and many subjects, you need interaction, reinforcement and more. 

We have college professors who repeat almost the same identical lectures for years to various audiences and also take few or no questions. they might as well be recorded  and find something better to do. But how do you learn French just from a book when it is completely not obvious how to pronounce anything given the weird spelling and grammar rules? How do you know if the dialect you use swallows some sounds or stretches them out a bit? For this you need to hear and perhaps see native speakers and correlate those sounds to the written words and learn to recognize and make them a habit. Even better, you often want someone to listen to what you try to say and respond and help guide you.

Many Computer topics have an interesting side in that access to a computer running whatever you are learning can give you much experience and guidance as you can try various things and see how they work. Written text alone may be enough to learn what is special about a language and a set of problems to work on (or your own exploration) may be able to replace much of human interaction.

You can look at learning systems such as COURSERA where they often break a "class" into parts that can include often shorter video clips often with subtitles or transcripts alongside it, as well as various kinds of printed material including tests and assignments and even ways (in some programming courses) to write small programs that are evaluated immediately by running them through the language program, or by having others (sometimes fellow students) grade them and return the results to you.

There are many ideas out there how to learn. One of the worst is huge lecture halls with no rewind ...

But text-only learning tools vary quite a bit and some of the better ones do not just throw facts at you but stop periodically and give you an overview of the goals and maybe add a touch of history that provides context on why some innovation was such a big improvement over what had been done and help you pronounce things when it is not obvious by saying that many people say a function name to rhyme with this or ...

I used to hate Math textbooks that used every imaginable symbol and assumed you knew how to say every Greek letter and script L and integral symbol and an assortment of braces and brackets in various sizes and much more.  It is hard to memorize formulas where you call lots of items by the name of "squiggle"!

Python currently sticks largely to using standard ASCII characters so it has fewer issues to deal with. For people who are not native English speakers, though, some things may not be intuitively obvious, let alone pronounceable. I suspect for some purposes, a few lectures to listen to might help if well-designed. 
But I noticed how in Julia, they allow all kinds of symbols but also provide a way to make them fairly easily. Still their use of an actual lower-case epsilon as a synonym for "in" is an example of how teaching Julia may need more thantext for some people. It uses lots of unusual symbols for operators too thatare often familiar to mathematicians and hardly anyone else.
for i ∈ 1:10
-----Original Message-----
From: 2QdxY4RzWzUUiLuE at potatochowder.com
To: python-list at python.org
Sent: Fri, May 6, 2022 8:56 am
Subject: Re: Python/New/Learn

On 2022-05-05 at 16:51:49 -0700,
Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 2022-05-05, Mats Wichmann <mats at wichmann.us> wrote:
> 
> > Without having any data at all on it, just my impressions, more
> > people these days learn from in-person or video experiences.
> 
> I've always been utterly baffled by video tutorials for
> programming. There must be people who prefer that format, but it seems
> like absolutely the worst possible option for me. You can't cut/paste
> snippets from the examples. You have to constantly pause them so you
> can try out examples. Sometimes it's not even easy to read the
> examples. Perhaps if there was an accompanying web page or PDF...

+1 (maybe more), except that an accompanying web page or PDF only solves
the problem of copying/pasting examples badly, at the expense of the
cognitive load to keep track of one more thing (because it's highly
unlikely that the web page or PDF tracks the video "automatically").

As far as easy-to-read examples go, writing them down doesn't always
help.  One of my physics textbooks used upsilon and nu to describe some
phenomenon related to lasers.  IIRC, the text, the math, and the physics
were pretty straightforward, until you looked at the fraction υ/ν in
something resembling Times Roman Italic (although, to be fair, once you
got that far, it was pretty obvious that it was upsilon over nu rather
than nu over upsilon).
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