Python too easy?
 

Not too long ago I read a thread (not on this forum), where a US highschool teacher did not want to teach Python because it was too easy to learn and would soon bore the students!

Wow, teaching a computer language like it would be a phrase based foreign language, with no considerations for applications and problem solving! With teachers like that, no wonder our highschools are an educational morass.

What language should this "teacher" teach?

The teacher should teach C# or Java

If I was a teacher and teaching students with no previous programming experiance, I'd go with Pascal.

Either the teacher's students are extremely bright, or the teacher is somewhat ignorant of Python's capabilities. Metaclasses, first class functions, generators and the like are not concepts I'd have thought were easy to wrap one's head around. Still, it seems something of a compliment that the basics of Python are considered to be so easy to learn :)

If Python is "too easy", I'd suggest taking a look at something like Haskell. That's a pretty involved language.

I vaguely remember that Pascal was written for teaching, by a teacher. Never liked the := and the ; after every statement except before an else. A nice way to pester students.

Perhaps he doesn't know either his students nor Python (I don't know Python either, but I'd be very surprised if you can't do complex things with it.) Or perhaps he's just a neurotic with low self-esteem. You know, like those who constantly say that things are "easy" in an embarrassing attempt to make others think "wow, if he thinks that's easy, he must be really smart." :)

Well, Python's considerably easy to quickly pick up and throw some code out yer ass. However, what's difficult is using it well to make complicated scripts. Most schools don't go in to the "complicated" stages. Therefore, it would be too easy for what it will be used for. In C++, you would learn a lot more programming a prime number generator then you would in Python.

Maybe he should teach the Shakespeare programming languange. That way they get credit for CS and Literature at the same time. ;)

The reason why a basic course won't go into more difficult stuff is probably lack of time, but if less time is spent on the syntax (or whatever it is that makes Python simple) then there's more time for other things. Filling a course with Python stuff that is just about on the right level shouldn't be difficult.

Edit: When I say "basic", I mean the english word and not the computer language. :P

The teacher's an idiot. All decent programming languages, including Python, are very powerful. Though the syntax might be simple, using it to construct complicated solutions is not.