[python-advocacy] Python as a 1st Lang. Tutorial in Chicago

[sdeibel]

On Wed, 29 Mar 2006, Michael Tobis wrote:
> I decided to set up a requirement that people show up with a laptop
> with python installed, and knowing how to run helloworld.py from a
> file and the equivalent at the interactive prompt.
>
> Python is easy enough to install on a given platform, but supporting
> both major commercial platforms and every imaginable flavor of unix in
> an installation meeting was something I didn't want to take on.
>
> In my opinion this worked out well enough.

Good to know.  Requiring laptops makes sense too.

Did you think at all about using something like pygame or a 
plotting library for the intro?  I'm interested particularly in 
drawing people into the possibilities of what Python could do for 
them (either for fun, or for their particular livelihood) and 
having that motivate them to learn conceptually trickier things 
like loops, etc, afterward.

> Sorry for the bad URL transcription. I should know better than to type
> a URL when I can paste it.
>
> Try http://webpages.cs.luc.edu/~mt/pyfl/pyfl.html

No problem -- our emails crossed.

- Stephan