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From: manis@grads.cs.ubc.ca (Vincent Manis)
Newsgroups: comp.edu,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Which language to teach first?
Message-ID: <4603@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Date: 28 Jul 89 21:18:55 GMT
References: <8514@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Sender: news@cs.ubc.ca
Reply-To: manis@grads.cs.ubc.ca (Vincent Manis)
Organization: The Invisible City of Kitezh
Lines: 53

In article <8514@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
lacey@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (John Lacey) writes:

>My own predjudices are to use Scheme.  Another choice, considerably more
>conservative, would be Modula/2 or Oberon.  Ada, to my own taste, is 
>completely out of the picture.

I think that deciding upon the language to use first is most definitely
the wrong paradigm. Imagine deciding first whether to use alternating or
direct current when teaching physics! You should look at what you want
your course to accomplish before deciding upon the particular tools to
use. 

A first-year major-level science course ought to try to present the
discipline as an integrated whole, covering not just the current
consensus, but also the historical process by which that consensus was
developed, and the questions which researchers in the field are
currently investigating. It should also try to lure outstanding students
into that field.

Teaching programming is clearly going to address none of these issues,
as the report of the ACM Task Force on the Core of Computer Science (Jan
CACM, I believe) states forcefully. Rather, we should concentrate upon
characterising what computer science is, which in my mind constitutes
such concepts as abstraction and automata fully, and demonstrating how
these concepts intertwine. Applications are important, but they should
be significant ones, not just producing paycheques (mea culpa! mea culpa
maxima!). 

Not surprisingly, I consider Abelson and Sussman a seminal book in the
field, because it does exactly what I have stated. Abelson and Sussman
happen to use Scheme, and therefore, if one is using their book, the
laboratory work (*not* programming assignments!) would be done in
Scheme. I can imagine using Prolog or Oberon, but Scheme is already such
a good candidate that there seems no point. 

We at UBC expect to switch over to Abelson and Sussman fully in the fall
of 1990 for our major students. The final negotiations for getting
University approval are at present just getting started. 

There is, however, the non-major population, who clearly neither want
nor need Abelson and Sussman. With this group, programming is clearly
not the major issue, and Pascal is quite suitable. We're looking at the
UC Berkeley computer literacy course, `Computing Unbound', to serve
this group. 
____________  Vincent Manis                    | manis@cs.ubc.ca
___ \  _____  The Invisible City of Kitezh     | manis@cs.ubc.cdn
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