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From: davee@hpcll14.HP.COM (Dave Elliott)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: introductory language
Message-ID: <960021@hpcll14.HP.COM>
Date: 9 Apr 90 16:50:27 GMT
References: <7300008@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Calif. Language Lab
Lines: 32


  I teach several evening courses at National University in San Jose.  The 
core of the undergraduate CS curriculum is a three course sequence:
                               C Programming
                               Data Structures
                               Algorithms
  Each course lasts one month, with sessions held two nights a week (4.5 hours
per evening) and 1.5 Saturdays.  When I first started teaching these courses
the language used was Pascal.  In response to student "requests" (petitions,
etc.), the language was changed to C.  The students felt that this would 
improve their job prospects upon graduation.
  These are my observations:
    1) More students are dropping out of the program during the first month.
          Which is more intimidating?
                     read(num) 
                        or
                  scanf("%d",&num)
    2) Students are having a harder time grasping the concepts of the second
        and third month because they are still struggling with C.
    3) The quality of the students' programs have suffered.
    4) It is harder to find good textbooks that use C.
    5) The students that graduate are having an easier time finding jobs.
  
  There's no doubt that employers are viewing C knowledge as a big advantage
in choosing among applicants.
  My recommendation would be to teach the introductory CS courses in Pascal.
Once the students are completely comfortably with the concepts of good
programming, give a course on "C for the Pascal Programmer".  Teaching C to 
non-programmers may only produce a new crop of bad coders.

                                              -- Dave Elliott
                                                 davee@hpda.hp.com