Pythoneers at SIGSCSE
March 15th, 2005
Several 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.
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.