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Sorry, but I felt obliged to change the subject header On Wednesday 04 February 2004 14:22, James Wonnacott wrote:
We were having a discussion on this topic today at the school where I work. Some of the students want to start to learn some programming: we have staff willing to learn and want to know what language to use. As we have a system where most of our PCs will boot into Linux or windows I suggested using a C on Linux, however the question which arose was what help/ teach youself/getting started is there. I'm not a progammer myself and have no experience of using C but said I'd post on this list for any advice you could give. I'm trying to increase the use of Linux here and demonstrate its advantages so please, any help would be great.
I'm not an educationalist so maybe someone else can describe what I am trying to say a little better, but I think the question is about reward. If you are trying to learn something then it helps if your learning is rewarded by results - feedback loops start occurring. The problem with C, is that you have to learn so much before you can start writing code which will give you some really interesting results. I admit that this opinion is open to question but personally, as an amataur, I have never found the write code - get reward/result cycle to be anything like fast enough for my limited brain. I tried Visual Basic long ago. With that you can get rewarded without having to write any code at all. Drag and drop and - "cool, I have a user interface" - but then you have to start actually writing code and things get a lot harder (insert fav. vb hate story here). Then I spent a lot of time with Java - but should have learned C++ instead! - probably just as difficult and certainly a lot slower. But then most people would not have been foolish enough to try running a Java GUI built with Swing components on a P133. After that, I gave up on GUI stuff and tried Python. The tutorial that came with it was excellent, although I got a bit lost about 3/4 the way through, but then it was intended as a tutorial to the whole language and not a beginners guide. Since then I have grown to love the language. It has has a very good effort/reward ratio. I believe it should be relatively easy for tutors to pick up enough about the language to start teaching students about it. As a scripting language it doesn't require a compile stage. It is also helpful that the language is cross-platform and open-source - you might be running python on linux machines at college, but a student who really picks up on it and wants to work at home might need to run it on a windows machine - just give them a CD! (I'm being practical here, not idealistic). With a little thought, tutors could come up with several coding projects for students to try out. For those who really want to try GUI coding there is always WXPython, which has matured a lot since I first encountered it and is developing a good-looking open-soure IDE in "Boa Constructor". Anyway, if you choose Python, keep me informed, I will be glad to help. Tony -- 404 Future not Found -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.