Learning With D

[Russel Winder]

On Sun, 2011-05-22 at 16:26 -0400, bearophile wrote:
[ . . . ]
> Regarding languages to be used as first language for adults or
> near-adults, I think there is no very good language for this purpose
> (for children the situation is better, there are many Logo variants,
> some graphical languages, etc). And even if you invent a language very
> good for this purpose, probably no one uses it, there are no libs and
> ecosystem for it, so it keeps being a mostly useless and buggy toy. I
> don't see many ways out of this situation.

Uuuurrr... this is just wrong on so many levels.  To avoid writing an
10,000 word essay, I'll just stick to:  Python and Groovy have proven to
be excellent languages for teaching first year undergraduates and
adults.  Using robots wandering round screens is as good a technique for
adults as it is for children.  This is not speculation this is annually
provable fact witness various teachers in various universities actually
doing it.

Possibly the single most important factor is having an edit/execute
environment that works in terms of compilation units, though usually
files.  Groovy has the Groovy console which is brilliant, Python has
idle, which is about adequate.  REPLs are just not good enough for this
task despite the obsession with using them in the Lisp, Scala, Clojure,
Prolog, Haskell, etc. communities.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at russel.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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