HP Prime Beta Firmware Version 2.2 Revision 15008

[parisse]

Some remarks about Python.

The size of a typical arm32 MicroPython implementation is about 300K of code (perhaps a little more on the Prime because we have more modules than other manufacturers provide). If Python would not be included, this would reduce the amount of RAM available by about 2% on a G1 (300K of code copied in RAM on about 16M of free RAM) and less than 0.2% on a G2 (245M of free RAM). It does not change the flash storage size available to the user, because it's not on the same partition (on a G1 at least).

Personnally, I think that having more programming languages should be considered as a good thing. We have 3 langages on the Prime: Home PPL, CAS programs, and Python. I think a good addition in the future would be Javascript. I think this should be done independantly of one particular country curriculum, because this is fluctuant, not the same in all countries, and my guess is that many Prime users are buying a Prime because it's the best calculator on the market, not because it's recommended by their teacher. That's clearly the case for France at least.

Python was an important marketing point for selling calculators in France during the last 7 years, it certainly helped Numworks conquer more than half of the graphing calculator market in France. The reason is that someone at the Education Ministery decided about 7 years ago that programming should be done with Python in all highschools. But this is in fact communication, not reality, most high school students knows almost nothing in Python programming except for a few students who had passionate teachers or are themselves passionate.
Many highschools students have almost no programming lessons because the teachers are math teachers, not computer science teachers, and for those who teach programming, most are teaching Python on PC in the computer lab, not on calculators. In fact, you don't really need to program, if you look at the programming questions at the baccalaureat, it's always the same kind of questions about a recurrent sequence, the students does not have to write a complete function, he has just some blanks area to fill in an existing program or do some "reverse-engeneering" and guess what the function "mystery" does, which is very easy since it's related to a math question before.
Moreover, the program provided in the statement is most of the time badly written (for example, the program will loop forever for a range of arguments, or it will run in O(n^2) instead of O(n)), because the teachers who write the statements are math teachers and have no training in computer science. This year one of the two statements had no programming question, and this will certainly convince many math teachers to shrink the time devoted to teach programming.

I think that forcing *math* teachers to teach programming *exclusively* with Python is a big failure, comparable to the educational failure of the "maths modernes" in the 70's. The situation before Python was imposed was I think much better for most students, because the teacher could choose the language. Most teachers were using a much simpler programming language named algobox, and only those teachers that were really comfortable with Python used Python. You can't really teach if you are not comfortable with what you teach.