Pythoneering

I gave my last Secure Computing lecture today - the last ever Secure Computing lecture, as it happens - and my students prepared a little ’surprise’ for me. Halfway into the lecture, “Never Gonna Give You Up” began blaring out from beneath the lectern!

On investigating further, I discovered a notebook computer and miniature speakers, carefully concealed behind a poster. Kudos to Chris Worfolk for making it happen. Now if only he’d hacked my laptop and made that Rick Astley video appear in place of the slides…

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about Python 3.0 and the impact it might have on our teaching of the language to our first-year students - most of whom have done little or no programming before.

I’ve written a paper about the issues; you might want to check it out if you have an interest in the teaching of programming using Python.

It’s that time of the year again, when our final-year students begin their project work. In the run-up to project selection, it was tremendously encouraging to see how many of them were keen on using Python in general, and the Django framework in particular. And it now looks like two or maybe three of my four students will be making significant use of Django. Java doesn’t go unrepresented either, with one student planning on doing interesting things with Eclipse and version control.

Anyway, I hope all of my guys get stuck in and do some good work. Projects that go well can be as rewarding for the supervisor as they are for the student!