Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?
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Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?
#2Interesting, as someone who loves math learning programming as an extension of math made a lot of sense. It also explains why other people I know struggled to learning to program in the same setting, but later we’re able to thrive given a different curriculum.
Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?
#3[deleted]
Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?
#4The biggest problem with the first language is that a student has nothing to compare it to, and so naturally comes away thinking that the design decisions in that language are a reflection of some deep underlying truth, that this language is The Way Things Should Be Done rather than a product of its time and particular goals of its designers.
When I was a wee coder I thought BASIC was the bee's knees. I don't think that any more, but it was a painful series of transitions until I discovered Lisp and never looked back.
Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?
#5Given the ever-increasing amount of automation in the economy, I believe that programming (of one form or another) is going to become a skill as important as writing. Everyone learns how to write in school, even though only a few become novelists or journalists. Similarly, everyone will learn to code even though only a few will become data scientists or software engineers.
Programming for non-professionals looks a lot more like Excel than Python. I imagine the trend will continue where deceptively simple interfaces allow people to automate routine tasks. Those interfaces might get more expressive languages, but most programs will be at most a dozen lines long.
That's the kind of language I think we should start with. We can worry about more detailed CS topics for the students who actually specialize in that.
Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?
#6From the PL theory front, when confronted with the idea that languages shouldn't necessarily assume prior mathematical knowledge, even some well-known researchers simply shrug and say "I can't do anything about that." And those same people will also criticize more popular/accessible languages on the grounds that they lack features from their favorite pet language based in some mathematical footing.
The hypocrisy is real. It is definitely a real problem. If your field has confined itself in formalism without a consideration for HCI, you are doing yourself harm. Not only is the transfer of knowledge to industry and other domains harder, you miss out on equivalent but more accessible ways of expressing the same ideas.
Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?
#7Georgia Tech around the year 2000 required most new students to take CS 1301/1311/whatever number course. It was, at one point, taught with a Pascal-derived pseudocode (incredibly unpopular, though I liked it quite a bit). Then they switched to Scheme (using SICP?) which was a fantastic catastrophe, major cheating scandal the first year. The TAs were not prepared (most had not taken it themselves and many/most were only sophomores or juniors with insufficient experience or time to teach themselves). Then they switched to Python (?), I don't know what they used after that because by then anyone I still knew at the school was beyond the freshman classes, most having graduated.
At the same time they had the Scheme-based course (and possibly before, but I know at this point) they also offered a MATLAB-based introduction for non-CS/CMPE/EE students (EE and CMPE had to take the first 2 or 3, respectively, CS courses with the CS majors as part of their degree program). This MATLAB course was targeted more towards ME, AE and other majors who really just needed something that let them write programs to solve problems in their domain. Many of them did much better. The problems assigned were better motivated for them and they were able to apply it within their broader course of study or internships or research work.
That a first course should be appropriate to the desired outcome for the students seems obvious, I'm rather surprised there's much debate around this topic.
Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?
#8Interesting, as someone who loves math learning programming as an extension of math made a lot of sense. It also explains why other people I know struggled to learning to program in the same setting, but later we’re able to thrive given a different curriculum.
Then you may as well also ask "why did we ever think the kind of math you learned first didn't matter?"
It's a ridiculous straw man, deals with symptoms instead of problems, and leads to an "everyone has an opinion" situation beyond any usefulness.
Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?
#9The biggest problem with the first language is that a student has nothing to compare it to, and so naturally comes away thinking that the design decisions in that language are a reflection of some deep underlying truth, that this language is The Way Things Should Be Done rather than a product of its time and particular goals of its designers. When I was a wee coder I thought BASIC was the bee's knees. I don't think t…
I started with machine codes. Followed by ASM, Turbo Pascal, C/C++. I played with BASIC but quickly dismissed it as it would greatly limit of what I could do (I was hooking computers to devices using high speed parallel bus and processing data in real time). No college. I was studying physics in university. All my programming experience I got by looking at docs and somebody else's codes. Of course every once in a while I would use something like Matlab to solve my little problems and when I switched to develop software for living I also used many other languages. Now I mostly free to choose whatever tools I see fit and usually stick to 3 - C++ for backends, Delphi/Lazarus for desktops and JavaScript for web front ends. Occasionally use C when I have to do firmware. I played up to my gills with many scripting languages like Python. Personally I found that on any project of decent size they do not speed up development at all. The performance loss of the end product however is monumental.
Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?
#10Georgia Tech around the year 2000 required most new students to take CS 1301/1311/whatever number course. It was, at one point, taught with a Pascal-derived pseudocode (incredibly unpopular, though I liked it quite a bit). Then they switched to Scheme (using SICP?) which was a fantastic catastrophe, major cheating scandal the first year. The TAs were not prepared (most had not taken it themselves and many/most were o…
This feels like a narrative in need of hard evidence. I was there at what I assume was the tail end of this in 1997. My gut was cheating was no worse then it had been, but they had automated systems for the first time.
Some of it was so silly that I was accused of cheating in the C course for using and citing the hashtable implementation from the assigned textbook. On just talking to the graders and professor, they dropped it and were amused that anyone used the book.
For the other sciences, they would shake up the rules on how to capitalize figures. Idea being that cheaters would use last year's rules. Or, lazy people would just not pay attention..