A Shorter Version of the Sets and Tuples Episode
One of the many advantages of online delivery of course material is that it allows us to present content in several ways, tailored to different audiences. For example, some people want to understand how sets are stored in hashtables; others just want to know that you cannot put a list in a set, and should use a tuple instead. We now have episodes catering to both: the longer and more detailed one posted last week, and a shorter and less detailed one posted today. We’d welcome feedback: is this confusing, helpful, or (as is so often the case) a bit of both?
This is definitely an improvement for those of us who just want to be able to use Python without understanding what’s going on under the hood, and I very much appreciate your efforts in this regard. That said I think this is still far too long and detailed for most folks. Accepting for the moment that the description of a hash table and therefore why it can’t use mutable objects is necessary, I don’t think it’s necessary to walk through all of the possible approaches to dealing with this. Why not just skip from the definition of the problem to the first slide on tuples using a transition like “Python deals with this problem by…” This removes 1.5 minutes from the episode while only removing a computer science thought experiment (i.e. How would we deal with this is we were building our own programming language).
Thanks again for the initial shortening. Whether you remove more material or not the cut to five minutes will definitely help keep more folks around.