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From: rwallace@vax1.tcd.ie
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: SEEKING SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHING A LANGUAGES COURSE
Message-ID: <6717.26c20a9a@vax1.tcd.ie>
Date: 10 Aug 90 01:15:05 GMT
References: <90Aug8.173401edt.7886@neat.cs.toronto.edu>
Organization: Computer Laboratory, Trinity College Dublin
Lines: 25

In article <90Aug8.173401edt.7886@neat.cs.toronto.edu>, mgreen@cs.toronto.edu (Marc Green) writes:
> I'm teaching a two term course in programming languages. I want to
> stress principles rather than specific languages. I'm finding it a
> difficult subject to teach. Last year, I ran through "features" (data
> structures, control structures, etc.) the first term and languages the
> second. It didn't seem to work well that way.
> 
> I'm hoping to ge some suggestions from the more experienced on good
> ways to organize such a course. I'm also looking for suggestions on
> useful readings.

Stressing principles is a nice idea but I've yet to meet anyone who learned any
principles of computer science without first doing the practice. The point here
is that perhaps you should concentrate on first teaching people a lot of
different languages and then they'll be able to pick up the ideas. Say your
students have learned a language like C which is suitable for software
engineering. You could try giving them introductions to FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC,
Lisp, Forth, Algol etc. and hope they pick up some ideas of what programming
languages are about. At the very least it'll teach them to appreciate the good
qualities of whatever language they've been learning for mainstream programming
:-).

"To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem"
Russell Wallace, Trinity College, Dublin
rwallace@vax1.tcd.ie