Python in Education

14  |  Chapter 3: Why Python in Education?

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code written using the Perl programming language will look for

duplicate words in a text document:

print "$.: doubled $_\n" while /\b(\w+)\b\s+\b\1\b/gi  

Can you work out how Perl does this?

(In Perl’s defense, it is an amazingly powerful programming lan‐

guage with a different set of aims and objectives than Python. That’s

the point—you wouldn’t try to teach a person how to read with

James Joyce’s 

Ulysses

, despite it being widely regarded as one of the

top English-language novels of the 20

th

 century.)

Put simply, because you don’t have to concentrate on how to read or

write Python code, you can put more effort into actually under‐

standing it. Anything that lowers the effort required to engage in

programming is a good thing in an educational context (actually,

one could argue that this is true in all contexts).