Let me enter into the discussion with a question. John has pointed out in
his original posting that it used to be fairly common practice 20-30 years
ago (I think) to have statics first in the introductory textbooks. Sears
and Zemansky is an example that immediatly comes to my mind. My question
is:
Do any of the older readers on this list have any knowledge or speculations
as to why this practice fell out of favor?