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From: reggie@dinsdale.nm.paradyne.com (George W. Leach)
Newsgroups: comp.edu,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Which language to teach first?
Message-ID: <6454@pdn.paradyne.com>
Date: 1 Aug 89 11:23:21 GMT
References: <8514@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> <13158@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
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Reply-To: reggie@dinsdale.paradyne.com (George W. Leach)
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In article <13158@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> tka4092@athena.mit.edu (Terry Alkasab) writes:

>        I just finished my freshman year at MIT.....

>A *huge* percentage of the class already had programming experience
>(in whatever language:  BASIC, Pascal, C, or what have you) and thus
>were not learning *programming* per se, but programming *theory*.

       When I left high school nearly 15 years ago and began my freshman
year I too had some programming experience.  We had a course in BASIC in
high school that was only in its second year when I took it.  While the
teacher who instituted the course was an excellent math teacher, he was
not qualified to teach this course.  Consequently many bad habits were
picked up that had to be broken in an introductory CS course.  I would
imagine that this is a far more serious problem these days with the
proliferation of PCs and inexpensive compilers.  The availability of
programming courses at the primary and secondary school system level
must have exploded during the past decade.  I know that my younger 
brothers had more hardware and courses available to them than I did in
my high school days.  The large base of self taught hobbiests also
contribute towards the problem.

       Computing is still a young discipline.  There is such a demand
in industry for the skill of programming a computer that must be filled.
There are also too many programs out there calling themselves Computer
Science that do nothing more than teach programming and different languages.
This is especially true in the two year college programs.  Certainly the
situation has improved over the 70's, but we still have a long way to go.


>As an interesting note, on the first day, the professor asked how many
>students had no previous programming experience.  When a smattering of
>the class raised its hand, the professor reassured them saying that
>having no experience might prove beneficial, since learning the stuff
>he was about to teach would require many of their classmates to
>unlearn stuff they had long since learned.  This was supported by a
>friend of mine who had problems with the class at first because she
>said she was trying to translate everything she did into BASIC.

     Many studies of programmer behavior have indicated that the novice
programmer thinks in terms of a specific language syntax, while with
experience comes more abstract thinking without worring about implementation
language details.  The trick is to teach an introductory course that can
avoid this pitfall.  Most intro course concentrate too much on an introduction
to a specific programming language syntax.  One of the goals of the course is
to enable a student to utilize this language in any of the advanced courses
that will be encountered further down the road.  Often the focus is on the
programming language with little emphasis on the theory behind computer 
science.


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