Python is one of those languages that I feel like I should know better. I bought a book on it a couple weeks back and thought I’d try to figure out why I can’t get anything that’s Python based to work on any of my Linux machines. I figure that it has to be something common that I’m doing on all of them. There’s some default I’m setting/not setting.

Anyway. My daughter came to me the other day and said, “Dad? Can you teach me to read computer codes?”

“What do you mean ‘computer codes’? What kind of codes?”

She shrugged, “I don’t know. Whatever there is.”

So I gave her this book on Python for Absolute Beginners. I pointed out that Python is a kind of computer code and that by writing programs with it, she can get her computer to do stuff. I showed her the CD in the back of the book with Python and everything she needed to get started.

As of today - three days later - she’s read about half the book, installed python and all the ancillary utilities on her own computer, and written 8 or 9 programs in Python. She thinks she’d like to “learn more about web pages” now and has asked what kind of programming they use. She figures to be through the book by the end of the week next week, although I think she’ll slow down a little when she gets into the root-window interface stuff.

Punchline: She’s 10 and she’s helping her 7 year old sister install it on her computer so they can have “programming contests” and they don’t think anything is out of the ordinary with this.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 28th, 2006 at 11:15 pm and is filed under Observations, Kids. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.