[Python-il] Python/OSS education

[guy keren]

Rani Hod wrote:
>     Now, the most Utopian thing would be if the Ministry of Education
>     would suddenly decide that the 5-unit Bagrut in computers would
>     consist of learning Python/OSS, including all the skills I mentioned
>     above, and then the big universities will teach Python in their
>     introductory programming courses instead of C and Java. That would
>     be heaven, and in my opinion this will greatly improve Israel's tech
>     scene in 5-10 years.
> 
>     But it would be very hard to make it happen, as the Ministry of
>     Education is very conservative, and so are universities.[1]
> 
> 
> Update: Tel-Aviv University is having a pilot next semester (the spring 
> one) of teaching Introduction to Computer Science (for CS students) in 
> Python (rather than in Scheme, which is a variant of lisp).
> 
> I happen to be the TA in this class, so I would be happy to hear 
> suggestions.
> 
> Note that this is NOT an Introduction to Programming course. I do not 
> expect students to know Python's ins and outs. I'll mention 
> documentation and debugging, but won't go into licensing.

One thing of importance: one of the problems with high-level languages, 
is that they hide efficiency issues very well - e.g. people start using 
lists, dictionaries and such, with little awareness to what goes under 
the hood - and as a result don't get the feel for how efficient (or not) 
some of the data structures are.

are you going to tackle this issue in this course? i got a feeling you 
won't be using python in the data structures course - and many people 
may miss the connection.

--guy