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From: darin@nova.laic.uucp (Darin Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: Which language to teach first?
Message-ID: <645@laic.UUCP>
Date: 2 Aug 89 18:07:42 GMT
References: <3876@shlump.nac.dec.com> <791@dms.UUCP>
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Reply-To: darin@nova.UUCP (Darin Johnson)
Organization: Lockheed AI Center, Menlo Park
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IMVHO, there are two types of beginning 'programming' classes.
The first type is the type often taught at community colleges, or in
math or engineering.  The purpose of this type of course is prepare the
student for programming in the real world, or for later classes that
will require programming.  The second type is the first (or nearly first)
class in computer-science.  In this type, the student is expected to learn
programming concepts, with less emphasis on silly details.

For the first type of course, a language should be chosen that will probably
be used later in the students career, or that is used on the departments
computers.  For an engineering department, FORTRAN may be a good choice,
since it will likely be used in later courses, and will inevitably be used
after graduation.  For a general course, probably Pascal, since it is
widely available.  Students who get good at Pascal can always move up
to Modula-II later in life to get real work done.  C will probably confuse
the issue.  Programming languages likely to be run into in later careers
(non-CS careers) will probably look similar to Pascal, such as DBaseIII,
etc.  Stuff like Scheme, Smalltalk, etc., are probably a bad way to go.
Remember, the majority of these students will not be able to just pick
up a new language and learn it.

For the second type of course, you should pick a language that enforces
or encourages what you are trying to teach.  Students who finish this
course will probably be expected to learn a variety of languages, so
they should learn techniques that will help no matter what they use later.
IMHO, this class should be taught concurrently with a basic CS course
(boolean logic, high-level computer organization, etc.).  The language
chosen should be powerful enough to get simple jobs done with little coding
(no PL/I here), demonstrate higher level techniques simply (such as recursion,
sets, possibly pointers), and have user definable data structures.
Pascal would also be good for this, despite the bad rap it gets.  Pascal
would also go good for students going into AI also (I see a bunch of AI
researchers that are lost when they have to use a traditional language).
Scheme would be a good choice.  It doesn't hurt to use a language that
won't be used in other courses, since it gives a broader view of languages.
Definately, don't allow students to graduate having used only one language,
or they will get the impression that that language is the best tool for
all jobs.

In my beginning class, I learned UCSD Pascal (at UCSD of course :-).  The
thing I liked best looking back, were the builtin 'turtle'-graphics.  This
allowed us to get reasonably complex programs done before learning how
to get around IO.  We learned recursion early on, by drawing fractal
trees, etc.  You could see on the screen what recursion did, and where
you went wrong.  Later, I was a proctor/assistant in that class, and in
another class that used Pascal on non-graphics terminals.  When teaching
recursion, the students with the graphics learned it much easier than those
who only had a bunch of numbers as output.

Darin Johnson (leadsv!laic!darin@pyramid.pyramid.com)
	We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.