On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 1:41 PM, harrismh777 <harrismh...@charter.net> wrote: > On the other hand, kids today are dumped into a first comp sci course in > programming and plopped in-front of a Hugs interactive shell and then are > expected to learn programming and be successful by trying to grasp pure > functional programming in Haskell(!) in a ten to 12 week term and we wonder > why so many students are failing their 'first' programming class!! Give me > a break. No, give them a break.
Well, at least Haskell is probably better as an introductory language than Lisp or Scheme. But what schools actually do this? My perception is that the vast majority of schools use C++ or C# or Java, typically relegating functional programming to a single second- or third-year course. Of course it's well known that MIT used to use Scheme, but they switched to Python a couple years ago. > Guido van Rossum has said in one of his interviews (can't remember now which > one) that BASIC is a terrible first computer language... and I agree... but, > it was a lot better than Hugs! But that's not my point, my point is that > Python is better still. Why? Because Python can be taught at a *very* > rudimentary level ( input, control, arithmetic, logic and output ) in almost > a BASIC or REXX procedural style -- top down -- so that students 'get it'. > Then, in subsequent classes down the road (much later) Python can grow and > expand with the student's re-conditioning for more in-depth expansion of > concepts and knowledge. I don't think a single language is necessarily going to be best for all students. If a math major comes to you wanting to learn some programming for theorem-proving, bearing in mind that they probably aren't interested in learning more than a single language, would you try to start them out with Python, or would you just give them the functional language that they're ultimately going to want? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
