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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?

#241

Post by airhead969 »

The ethics of academia requires that computer science shouldn't become a factory pumping-out sausages by the millions by whatever means necessary.

Perhaps a prerequisite of the major would be demonstrable knowledge of 2+ programming languages that exist in nearly orthogonal domains.

I think low-level to high-level, with the right amount of history, is the best way build rather than relying on mysterious abstractions below. Microcode, assembly, C or Fortran, are the fundamentals CS graduates should be required to have or the accreditation bodies aren't doing their jobs.

Also:

If you can teach monads, you're a great lecturer.

If you're Sean Davis from UC Davis, you are/were a great lecturer.

A great lecturer of technical minutiae both has an expressive personality and explains concepts as simply as possible using learning aids such as analogies, examples, and diagrams.

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#242

Post by syops »

benrbray wrote: post #98
syops wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person you responded to didn't make any claims about bad teachers or good teachers. The claim is that not everyone can understand computer science. As an extreme example do you think a person who is mentally disabled can understand computer science? From my perspective it's clear to me that not everyone can understand computer science and the same applies to many academic areas.

The grandparent comment was about teaching, so I interpreted the parent comment to mean that "innate ability matters much more than good teaching", which my personal experience teaching people disagrees with. And sure, the statement "not everyone can understand computer science" is technically true if you include people with mental disabilities. But in reality, some people draw the line a lot higher as a form of gate…

Thank you for the clarification. I understand your point now.

I teach math at a community college an I'm absolutely convinced not everyone can understand math. I'm not a great teacher and I think I'm not a terrible teacher. I've come to the following conclusion. For some people the effort required to learn the material given their natural ability is so high that they'll never get it. They won't be able to put in the effort required.

I could be wrong though and might be one of the people who let themselves off the hook as you mentioned.

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#243

Post by throwaway2037 »

alkonaut wrote: post #217

When I arrived at university we had to do a Haskell course first. I didn’t realize it at the time because it just felt backwards, but it was a great “reset” of the minds of everyone like me who had done C64 Basic and Pascal. It also served as a great equalizer in the class when some people had never programmed while some of us had done it for 15 years. The Haskell course put everyone on an equal footing.

"When I arrived at university" -- Usually 18 years old.

Then: "while some of us had done it for 15 years" -- I'm confused. Are some people learning to program a 3 years old? This is breaking new records for HN exceptionalism.

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#244

Post by spacedcowboy »

barry-cotter wrote: post #163
benrbray wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, by "can" I mean "has the mental capacity to". I agree with the statement "not everyone has the knowledge they need to understand chemistry right now ". I disagree with "not everyone has the mental capacity to understand chemistry". Note also my definition of "everyone". I certainly think everyone has the mental capacity to understand algebra.

> I certainly think everyone has the mental capacity to understand algebra. I invite you to tutor some middle school students then. For values of algebra that include “can be taught to draw the appropriate line given the corresponding equation” there are plenty who can’t understand algebra.

I don’t know about middle school kids, mine’s not there yet, he’s 9 - but he’s already done algebra, including simultaneous linear equations with multiple unknowns.

No powers, quadratic equation or differentiation and the like yet, but I can see the QE coming up in next years books (which we recently bought since 3rd grade just finished)

I’m pretty sure that when I was at school, this was a “senior school” (age 11-16) topic, and I was maybe 12 or 13. Kids are learning stuff earlier than they used to, at least it feels that way to me.

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#245

Post by ant6n »

thrower123 wrote: post #212
maximus-decimus wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you expect them to be able to do beside using Excel.

Usually the pipe-dream is that some sort of graphical "no-code" or "low-code" system with a crippled DSL will be more benefit than hassle, and enable them to do things without needing to actually know how programming and the whole stack of abstractions they are sitting on work. It's one of those things that is always 20 years away, like nuclear fusion.

This exists in some form. Its called Alteryx, and I have seen non programmers work on gigabytes of table data using it.

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#246

Post by alkonaut »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #243
alkonaut wrote: post #217

When I arrived at university we had to do a Haskell course first. I didn’t realize it at the time because it just felt backwards, but it was a great “reset” of the minds of everyone like me who had done C64 Basic and Pascal. It also served as a great equalizer in the class when some people had never programmed while some of us had done it for 15 years. The Haskell course put everyone on an equal footing.

"When I arrived at university" -- Usually 18 years old. Then: "while some of us had done it for 15 years" -- I'm confused. Are some people learning to program a 3 years old? This is breaking new records for HN exceptionalism.

University is often 19 or 20 here (mandatory military service!) but obviously there is no upper limit; some in my class had done it for 15 years (possibly more, we had people with existing careers, but they were older than me). I was 20 and had programmed for ~12 years at the time. Obviously zero years professionally.

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#247

Post by wirthjason »

teekert wrote: post #206

As a biologist I learned to program at 34, it was using Python (pandas and seaborn) in Jupiter notebooks. I mainly did data science in the beginning. I can tell you this worked extremely well for me. I could make small steps, add text and output variables and graphs constantly as I “developed”. It took me quite some time to shift to a full vscode flow, I kept going back to notebooks. I’ve become more of a software de…

There’s many different styles of programming. Excel and Jupyter notebooks are a kind of “end user computing”. Programs developed in those environments often need a lot of refactoring to get turned into “software” (by some arbitrary definition). However these programs are incredibly useful for the business ideas they explore.

To put it another way, using Notebooks with pandas is a great way to wrote biology programs. Using Notebooks to write pandas is a terrible way to write software.

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#248

Post by taeric »

wheelinsupial wrote: post #155
taeric wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

From [1], 2002 187 students investigated for cheating at GT. 77 students had their final letter grade dropped by at least one letter grade, 26 received an F, 32 received a zero for the assignment, one student was suspended for two semesters. Though I couldn’t read the full article, but that’s what it seemed to say in the first two paragraphs. There seems to be two slashdot threads discussing the issue from 2002. Perh…

I should have been clear on my call for hard evidence. I am not claiming point blank that there was no cheating. I caught some folks myself that left someone else's name on the submission.

Rather, a lot of what they classify as cheating in that time was stupid close to standard practice for sorority and fraternity members. Having banks of previous years tests and assignments, for example. (I say this as someone that was not in one, so mayhap I am misrepresenting.)

So, my request for hard evidence is mainly to get to a root cause and to establish norms and base rates of behaviors. Yes, it could have gotten worse or had some bad years. It feels highly suspicious that it just happened to correspond with the rust of automated graders. Yes, coincidences happen. Feels really shaky, though.

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#249

Post by mypalmike »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #226
jefftk wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand my team recent was taking about what languages we started with, and about 1/4 of us started with Basic. Seemed to recover ok!

I've started with BASIC as well, in the 80s, on a C64 Dijkstra was right: I've wasted a lot of time unlearning BASIC to re-learn, if I wasn't exposed to BASIC at all I could have learnt from scratch a proper modern programming language/paradigm

It helps to have a good teacher. My years of Atari 8 bit BASIC seemed more help than hindrance when a good high school computer teacher then taught me Pascal.

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#250

Post by throwaway2037 »

alkonaut wrote: post #246
throwaway2037 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"When I arrived at university" -- Usually 18 years old. Then: "while some of us had done it for 15 years" -- I'm confused. Are some people learning to program a 3 years old? This is breaking new records for HN exceptionalism.

University is often 19 or 20 here (mandatory military service!) but obviously there is no upper limit; some in my class had done it for 15 years (possibly more, we had people with existing careers, but they were older than me). I was 20 and had programmed for ~12 years at the time. Obviously zero years professionally.

Great point about mandatory military service. I did not consider it. In Korea, you can go after you university.
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