I wanted to write a little reflexion on teaching with Python after teaching it for a little over a week.
So far I'm pretty happy with Python as an instructional language. The highlights include:
- User input is very simple, which is great for students writing interactive programs. They can just dive in and worry more about the complexity of capturing user input.
- Output is also nice and simple, so again students can just get down to learning logic and programming constructs
- I've found Python to be easy to read without the visual clutter
- The students seem to be picking up on the language very quickly
I'm still torn about the lack of brackets. It makes sense, but most of the common languages out there use brackets, so I worry we are not training them on a very common construct. However, I am going to reserve judgment on this issue.
One other note about IDEs. We had to bail on Trinket because the free version doesn't have save functionality for Python 3, which is our language of choice. You could save your work via links, but it was very cumbersome without being able to save trinkets to a student's account. We switched to Repl.it as an experiment, and so far they seem to like it. I will update on future progress in a couple of weeks.