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From: mattias@emil (Mattias Waldau)
Newsgroups: comp.edu,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Which language to teach first?
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Date: 2 Aug 89 08:27:43 GMT
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At our four year long computer science education (Master) given since
-81 we have always had Lisp as the first language. First it was
MacLisp, now it is Common Lisp. The textbook we use is "Anatomy of
Lisp" by Allen.  We tried Abelsson and Sussman one year but the
students didn't like that book. Prolog is the second language, Prolog
and Lisp are used for most programming exercises, except where
low-level languages like assembler and C is needed (e.g. OS).


But to the point: Now and then we discuss using Prolog first, an
algorithmic language isn't actually needed until the students meet the
three books of Knuth. The difference between clean programming in Lisp
and Pascal is just syntax, the approach to solve a programming task is
the same.

If the students can Lisp then they learn Pascal, C, Ada within weeks.
But they are of course not professional programmers, that takes at
least a year.