http://efford.org/blog/archives/27 Random musings on Python, software engineering, the web & other stuff Thu, 04 Dec 2008 02:33:12 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0.4 http://efford.org/blog/archives/27#comment-12177 Tue, 18 Sep 2007 10:12:40 +0000 http://efford.org/blog/archives/27#comment-12177 [...] This was a talk by Nick Efford and Tony Jenkins about their experiences of using python as a first language for undergraduates at the University of Leeds. It started with an interesting picture showing two mountains and asking which was harder to climb. One was the Matterhorn the other was Everest. The point was that to someone unskilled in climbing they both look daunting but to an expert the Matterhorn is probably the slightly easier. This analogy was then extended to programming languages. C and C++ had been the mainstay at Leeds but then Java came along and seemingly offered a much easier option. Sadly though for the beginner this was still the difference between the Matterhorn and Everest. [...] […] This was a talk by Nick Efford and Tony Jenkins about their experiences of using python as a first language for undergraduates at the University of Leeds. It started with an interesting picture showing two mountains and asking which was harder to climb. One was the Matterhorn the other was Everest. The point was that to someone unskilled in climbing they both look daunting but to an expert the Matterhorn is probably the slightly easier. This analogy was then extended to programming languages. C and C++ had been the mainstay at Leeds but then Java came along and seemingly offered a much easier option. Sadly though for the beginner this was still the difference between the Matterhorn and Everest. […]

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