Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cica!ctrsol!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!indri!caesar!blake!uw-beaver!ubc-cs!faculty.cs.ubc.ca!manis
From: manis@faculty.cs.ubc.ca (Vincent Manis)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: models (was Which language to teach first?)
Message-ID: <4643@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Date: 2 Aug 89 16:59:30 GMT
References: <8514@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> <7870002@hp-lsd.HP.COM>
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Reply-To: manis@faculty.cs.ubc.ca (Vincent Manis)
Organization: The Invisible City of Kitezh
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In article <7870002@hp-lsd.HP.COM> tbc@hp-lsd.HP.COM (Tim Chambers) writes:
>I do not understand what Mr. Manis implies by the following, though.
>|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.
>If programming is *not* the major issue, why force them to study the theories
>using Pascal?  
Tim then points out that all of the Pascal concepts can be better taught
with Lisp.

Most non-major students will never, ever, write a program again (or will
use dBase or Hypercard or something). The issue is not so much to teach
them a particular language, or even a particular semantic base for a
language, as to give them something of a taste of what programming is.
Since it is not likely that they will understand much of the semantics,
the major goal is to have them get a grasp of what programming is, and
what major concepts such as conditionals and repetition are. If I were
to write a literacy book, I would no doubt use Scheme, but Pascal is as
suitable at that level. The book we're looking at happens to use Pascal.  

The fundamental point is that while I consider Scheme to be my language
of choice, I don't feel that that choice really matters to a group which
is extremely unlikely to pursue programming. Issues such as the quality
of the text, and the availability of instructors who can teach the
material, become much more significant.


____________  Vincent Manis                    | manis@cs.ubc.ca
___ \  _____  The Invisible City of Kitezh     | manis@cs.ubc.cdn
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