Pedagogy shouldn't recapitulate phylogeny: (stop teaching base plot!)
When you teach programming skills to people with the goal that they’ll be able to use them, the most important obligation is not to waste their time or make things seem more complicated than they are. This should be obvious. But when I’m helping humanists decide what workshops to take, reviewing introductory materials for classes, or browsing tutorials to adapt for teaching, I see the same violation of the principle again and again. Introductory tutorials waste enormous amounts of time vainly covering ways of accomplishing tasks that not only have absolutely no use for beginners, but which will confuse learners by making them
The mistake is: workshop leaders or teachers feel the need to walk through an ‘ old ’ way of doing something before teaching the way that students will actually do the thing.
To get the point across clearly, let me say some things.
In R, for me this fundamentally means: commit to the tidyverse.
Only ever teach
ggplot2; do not teach the base plotting functions. But above all, never teach both.
In Python
Never give the slightest acknowledgement to python 2.7.
Never teach matplotlib.
This seems obvious, but it makes me mad to see it. The reason why is not just that it’s a waste of student’s time, but that it makes me fear the instructor is either underqualified (perhaps they don’t know how to make a histogram in ggplot).
Are there exceptions? Yes. Or at least, maybe. One is when the intellectual concept is so much larger than a particular application that it’s worth exploring the general rule. Another is when the historical example is so, well, historical that exploring it as a cultural artifact is actually worthwhile. Sometimes both will happen. In my “Working with Data” class, I get students to do almost all of their manipulation with the filter, group_by, summarize, arrange, *_join, and pivot_* functions from the tidyverse’s dplyr and tidyr packages. These functions–as students will learn reading Hadley Wickham’s original article on the ‘ split-apply-combine ’ strategy–are ultimately descended from the original definitions in SQL.
I, myself, used to write an enormous amount of SQL code. After not doing so for a few years, my enthusiasm for duckdb has me doing it again. The point of this will be that the conceptual strategy is the same; and as a way to talk a bit about language design. (Is a good thing that “AS” is optional in SQL?) But I come to SQL after doing the basic operations in tidyverse, not before: the idea is to think about it after the fact.