I'd love to see an introductory course using Haskell on an open courseware channel.
Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)
111–120 of 253 posts
Re: Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)
#112I would guess Haskell would be perfect if the goal is to produce academics. But if most of your students are destined for industry, Haskell is in my opinion the absolute worst language. - You'll probably get a high drop out rate because of the complexity (recursion, pure / first class functions etc). - You rely that your students already have experience at high school with imperative languages - The industry by far s…
Industry is far too low a bar to aim at. College should give them the fundamental understanding of programming that they can apply to a variety of situations. Employability flows out of that.
I truly wish this was a more commonly held view point. You would think, speaking with many, that college was nothing more than a corporate worker mill.
Re: Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Java is definitely a terrible language for teaching and as a student's first introduction to arrays, memory handling and flow control it's pure terrible. However, Java is incredibly effective as a language for large teams. Since most of the companies coming to hire CS grads are big teams in need of extra hands on their software projects, they are looking for CS grads who know Java. So Java in universities is generall…
Up until about a decade ago, most CS graduates from MIT were never taught C or Java in any class. They still seemed to do pretty well in the job market. (Mostly it was assumed that if you really liked software development, you would go out and learn one of those languages outside of class, such as from a student-led seminar.)
It's just a business thing. Some large local companies come and talk to the university and say that they need a bunch of CS grads to fit into their business. The HR drone says they need to know Java to be able to integrate into the company quickly. The lecturers get upset. The finance department gets promised a donation, the marketing department gets promised easy job searching for CS students. The ivory tower crumbles a bit and the lecturers teach Java.
Re: Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)
#114Dijkstra assumes that students will already have been exposed to imperative languages before joining university, and will appreciate the change. I think that this assumption might leave behind students that have not yet been exposed to any programming (that stuck). Over in the UK I certainly hadn't encountered anything more complicated than html before I hit university, and was very happy with sticking with Java for…
> might leave behind students that have not yet been exposed to any programming And good riddance. If you make it to university without exposing yourself to your subject as a matter of passion (and few subjects are more easily approached by hobbyists than programming) you're going to waste your time there. University is a not a "school" you attend for learning a subject. You can't show up for English Literature if yo…
This strikes me as in principle somewhat wrong and in practice quite wrong. If American universities expelled everyone whose declared major was not a matter of passion, they would in general be pretty empty.
Re: Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)
#115I have to say that Java is the absolute worst language for pedagogy. Before people can write "Hello world", they're told they have to write "public static void main(String[] args)", which are presented as magic incantations, "don't worry about those yet". Thus begins the corporate-style coding culture of bashing stuff without understanding it. The stated reason for starting in Java is so that students can get coding…
No more magic than:
int main(int argc, char **argv)
Re: Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a transcript from Dijsktra's letter.
Yeah, I know. Dijstrka is pretty famous for picking the wrong side of fights about programming languages.
Perhaps by popularity and usage in corporate. In every other way, I'd say he is spot on.
Signed,
Numerous jvm lang and haskell programmer
Re: Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)
#117To me there seems to be something wrong with using as the first language something that depends on a very, very complicated runtime and execution model to run on the hardware we currently are using. This way people end up viewing programming languages as some God-given black box and not just something another computer program written by another person provides for you. I think CS students should instead start by lear…
> I think CS students should instead start by learning [...] programming on a level close to the computer architecture
I heard this idea before, sound interesting. Are you aware of any CS course starting with assembly as intro language?
Re: Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's trivially easy to write perfectly valid looking Haskell programs that are abysmally slow because of how they are actually executed, and since the reason for this can't be explained at a level of abstraction of such a course, people learn to treat the language as a closed black box, while you can't really competently use any language without understanding its execution model. Abstractions are fine, but you have t…
As Brian Beckman explained, as an aside, in "Don't fear the Monad" [1], these two differing views were born in the '70s and split two programmers into two camps: The bottom-up people, and the top-down people: - The bottom-up people start with the hardware and only add abstractions and trade performance where necessary (fortran, c, java) - The top-down people started with perfect abstraction/logic and reduced/removed…
> The bottom-up people [...] only add abstractions [later]
I don't think bottom-up verses top-down are like political camps. I think it's more innate, like right-brained vs. left-brained.
I can't understand abstractions till I first understand the lower level. I could never learn algebra without first learning arithmetic. (BTW, I'm old enough to have lived through the New Math philosophy which insisted that every grade school text book start with a chapter on set theory before moving on to, say, fractions.) This doesn't mean that I can't start with a functional model, but it does mean that I start with simple functions and move up.
Re: Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)
#119To me there seems to be something wrong with using as the first language something that depends on a very, very complicated runtime and execution model to run on the hardware we currently are using. This way people end up viewing programming languages as some God-given black box and not just something another computer program written by another person provides for you. I think CS students should instead start by lear…
I think you are placing too much emphasis on the start of one's education. Pick a place in the stack. Start learning. Over time you should go up and down the stack, building understanding as you go. This can be done from many places in the stack.
The point is that the later courses in CS curriculum depend much more on a good understanding of the imperative model and the issues that first arose in programming early Von Neumann computers, than they depend on understanding functional programming. Undergraduate algorithm classes are exclusively concerned with developing imperative algorithms. Large part of understanding operating systems is understanding how they handle memory management and that there is a need for it in the first place. Computer architecture and compiler courses are concerned with speeding up imperative programs. Even theory of computation courses spend more time exploring Von Neumann - like models than lambda calculus. You could redesign the whole curriculum of course, but then we don't happen to have computers that could more directly and efficiently execute functional programs, so I doubt this is a good idea.
Re: Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you are placing too much emphasis on the start of one's education. Pick a place in the stack. Start learning. Over time you should go up and down the stack, building understanding as you go. This can be done from many places in the stack.
That may be true, but it will not be until you descend the stack you start to code like someone who understands what they are doing. For instance I started off with PHP in high school and was using arrays with each entry as a string with a colin in it to split a key and value apart. So essentially I created the worlds worst hashmap and each lookup was O(N) - not to mention the actual string splitting I was doing on e…
What's the bottom? You clearly have something in mind, but why not starting with logic gates and work up to assembly? That is also a valid approach, and it works up to what you consider the bottom of the stack.
I do computer systems research. I am a big proponent of knowing how computer systems work. But I think people have an unhealthy fetish for how we start learning. You start once. You learn the rest of your life. Where you start is not the most important thing.