Pythoneers at SIGSCSE
March 15, 2005 – 8:43 amSeveral colleagues of mine at the University of Toronto were at SIGCSE 2005 a couple of weeks ago. They came back with lots to report; most interesting for me was the feeling that there’s growing interest in Python as a teaching language. One of them said that she could easily see Python becoming a major CS1 language over the next five years, and that if she had the time, she’d try to lead the wave by writing an introduction to computer science in Python. I only know of one book of this kind, which didn’t particularly impress me. I think that if Pythoneers are really serious about increasing their user base, they should start work now to organize a bunch of tutorials and meet-and-greets at next year’s SIGCSE in Houston.
One Response to “Pythoneers at SIGSCSE”
I don’t think I necessarily saw growing interest in Python. What I did see was more dissatisfaction with Java as a first-year programming language. The rest of the prediction was mostly my own.
If people are unhappy with Java as a teaching language, what is on the horizon? In my opinion, Scheme and Python are the two likely candidates at the moment. A number schools use Scheme already and while Scheme has some nice features, the fact that it is not a language heavily used in industry is a serious drawback. So, to my mind, Python is an interesting possibility that has many of the advantages of Java without some of the disadvantages.
By Karen Reid on Mar 15, 2005