My kid was working on their XO and said something like, “Dad, you promised to help me with Python.” It turns out they were working on their first python program, using the bare-bones IDE for the XO, Pippy. (Aside: If anyone has a suggestion for a better environment than Pippy, that runs on the XO, I’m all ears.) I helped with the syntax of an if statement and explained how else works, and how to quote the strings they were testing against. Looking over their shoulder I see that they’ve got a minimal version of a text adventure game shaping up. I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce lists and dicts, so I put together an email, that they’d have to refer back to later. Here is what I wrote:  Read →

I wanted to apologize for spamming Planet Python (and anyone else that happens to subscribe) with old posts recently. After spending many of my free hours for the past year noodling around with my weblog software (and the myriad of problems getting anything to run persistently on Dreamhost), I finally gave up and switched to WordPress. I’ve imported my old blogs for the sake of continuity (from Blogger and my own custom weblog, but not going back to Manila yet), and mapped the old URLs with redirects, so things should be fairly transparent to the casual observer.  Read →

Python has a well-earned reputation for being easy to use and to learn, at least for people who have learned programming in other languages first. Lately my kids have been very interested in programming, and I’ve found that Python doesn’t come as easily to 6-11 year olds as it does to adult programmers.  Read →