Given 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 lo…
It has been a pipe dream of some since the 1960s that "everybody" would program computers in the future. It hasn't happened and won't happen. Most people simply don't have the patience for it.
Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?
141–150 of 286 posts
Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you believe that "not everyone can understand chemistry"? Perhaps I should be a little more specific. When I say "everyone" below, I mean "the overwhelming majority of people in the average range of human intelligence, without debilitating mental deficiencies". This group spans virtually everyone you are likely to encounter, from car mechanics to school teachers, to postal workers, to professional software eng…
> Why do you believe that "not everyone can understand chemistry"? At least 5% of the population can’t understand algebra. If you can’t do algebra then you might be able to follow recipes but you can’t do chemistry. Without algebra you can’t do stochiometry and that’s essential for even high school level chemistry.
That's a very low bar, though. It would mean that 95% (ok, maybe slightly less) of everyone out there would be able to understand chemistry.
Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?
#143Given 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 lo…
I'm fairly sure that the average programmer today writes scripts for processing data in Python (or in R, Matlab, or something like that). Software engineers, data scientists, and other similar professionals who define themselves by their skills rather than their field are already a minority among programmers. Or maybe I'm just spending too much time with biologists.
Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?
#144There’s a lot of folks in this thread who’ve shared their personal experience with learning and teaching programming languages. Some attempt to generalise this experience into principles of how much the first language matters and how to choose it. It would move the conversation forward if people were up front about which metric they’re trying to move. For example, here are two equally valid pedagogical goals that are…
For what it's worth, the same reasoning can be heard in other fields. I work in foreign-language education, and debates about the best way to learn another language—memorize vocabulary and grammatical rules? move to a country where the language is spoken? watch a lot of movies in the language?—often reduce to competing personal success stories.
Teachers who have taught a foreign language using a particular method often come to believe that their method is the best, even though they are usually unable to measure the actual long-term outcomes for their students. It may be just too discouraging to be uncertain about the effectiveness of what one does to make a living, so teachers become advocates for whatever approach they happen to use.
Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?
#145The first language is incredibly important and I normally recommend javascript for the following reasons - it's /highly/ accessible (any computer with a browser can compile and run javascript - you just need to get your browser to load the file) - it shares a lot of its syntax with C-Style languages (which makes transference to other languages much easier - it's 'relaxed' on how it enforces rules (now, this is conten…
Even Python has some quirks beyond the usual monkeypatching madness that can occur, e.g. with regards to name scoping.
I'm honestly not sure what could fit here that isn't a LISP dialect (which I think is pedagogically the right choice, but is usually impractical unless one is sure that one wants to do "hardcore" CS stuff, vs. using coding as merely a tool in another field).
Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> University is not vocational training. University started out as a trade school for the clergy, then added law and medicine, and then became a finishing school. At all points the median student was more interested in drinking than studying. Scholarship has always been a minority pursuit at universities and research universities haven’t even existed for 300 years. Universities are now and always have been vocational…
... I'm not sure anything you said is true. Unless I'm misunderstanding you. See Cambridge as a counter example of everything you said: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Cambridge
Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has been a pipe dream of some since the 1960s that "everybody" would program computers in the future. It hasn't happened and won't happen. Most people simply don't have the patience for it.
I'm sure a century or two the same was said for reading and writing.
> In the US, 14% of the adult population is at the "below basic" level for prose literacy; 12% are at the "below basic" level for document literacy, and 22% are at that level for quantitative literacy. Only 13% of the population is proficient in each of these three areas—able to compare viewpoints in two editorials; interpret a table about blood pressure, age, and physical activity; or compute and compare the cost per ounce of food items.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy
Plus stuff like this:
https://eufactcheck.eu/factcheck/true-we-have-42-functional-...
And keep in mind Romania is average at a world level, economically, maybe even slightly higher than average.
On top of that programming is based on logic (for the layman who doesn't want to think of it as based on math; and let's not go into the layman's clear separation between logic and math), so it for sure has an extra difficulty level compared to reading or writing.
Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?
#148I think you should teach assembly language first, and then build a few simple high-level langauges on top of that. I suspect it would prevent a lot of mental dross from forming.
The ultimate frustration is in trying to support beginners in learning assembly, as they will feel absolutely bogged down whenever they hit an error and will be completely incapable of being independent in figuring out their problems. They will lean on the teaching staff like crazy (ask me how I know....) and it's this feeling of "my code is broken and I have no damn clue what is going on!" that drives people away from the field. They have to get eased into it.
When I taught undergrads a primarily Python-based class, I spent the first third of the semester teaching them how to effectively use pdb (or better yet, ipdb; tab completion!). Although my section did not get as far as other sections (i.e. we got to the end of the required material only, whereas other sections advanced to some optional stuff like numpy and Django), the profs teaching the following course told me how much they appreciated that the students from my section really could dive in and solve their problems (or at least give them a good first go). If you don't give beginner coders the tools to debug their own problems (which are lacking in the assembly world), it may hamstring them for the rest of their careers.
Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?
#149Georgia 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…
As of 2016, CS1301 was still in Python. CS1331 was in Java. MATLAB was present either in specialized CS classes (like computer vision) or in the Intro To CS for Engineers (CS1371). Not aware if it remained this way afterwards though.
Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don’t think everyone can understand computer science. This is a bold claim. None of us are special for working in tech. Our life has presented us the opportunity and passion to invest ourselves deeply in the field, often at great opportunity cost. Saying that a bad teacher makes no difference in student outcomes is equally ridiculous as saying an excellent teacher makes no difference in student outcomes. If that'…
It's a bold claim, but it's been largely proven by the famous "The Camel Has Two Humps" article that one basic prereq for learning CS/programming effectively is understanding that one is dealing with a formal system that's following consistent rules, even if it's not always clear what these rules might be. It seems to be quite hard to teach this understanding precisely to those who haven't internalized it, but it's a…
"That document was very misleading and, in the way of web documents, it continues to mislead to this day. I need to make an explicit retraction of what it claimed. Dehnadi didn’t discover a programming aptitude test. He didn’t find a way of dividing programming sheep from non-programming goats. We hadn’t shown that nature trumps nurture. Just a phenomenon and a prediction."