[Baypiggies] newbies night newbies

[Shannon -jj Behrens]

On 5/4/07, Benjamin Sergeant <bsergean at gmail.com> wrote:
> Some cents to give people the will to learn python: add a link to the
> python challenge on the slides on the newbies night:
> It's really important for me to have your hands on something when
> learning a new langage. The riddles are a good exemple.
>
> http://www.pythonchallenge.com/
>
> Another good idea (to me), is to show how to recode a historical
> program (coreutils, etc ...) in a few line (or maybe more) of code.
> One of the good example is the wget.py from Guido.
> Maybe this will be more attractive to Unix / Linux users thought.
>
> Find area where for other langage it's really a hassle to program (if
> you don't use third party), like:
>
> - Looping, iterating, working with containers. Differentiate the
> horror that is to learn the C++ STL syntax as opposed to the for i in
> a:
> - garbage collecting. Explain that the memory leak hunting does not
> exist in python.
> - And for last the pain to deal with string in C or C++ (the
> prehistorical function like strcat, dealing with unicode and the ugly
> wcstr ... functions).
>
> The comparaison could be: for point A, 2 lines for python, 6 lines for
> C, etc ...

I agree with everything above, except the bit about PythonChallenge.
I like to think that I'm a pretty good Python programmer, but that
challenge drove me nuts because I could never figure out what it was
trying to get me to do! ;)

Oh well,
-jj

-- 
http://jjinux.blogspot.com/