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From: lewis@rocky.STANFORD.EDU (Bil Lewis)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: first languages
Message-ID: <522@rocky.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: Wed, 26-Aug-87 02:22:38 EDT
Article-I.D.: rocky.522
Posted: Wed Aug 26 02:22:38 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 27-Aug-87 07:08:07 EDT
References: <405@ndsuvax.UUCP> <1010@argus.UUCP> <290@rruxa.UUCP> <1039@bsu-cs.UUCP> <2575@ames.arpa>
Organization: Stanford University Computer Science Department
Lines: 67
In-reply-to: lamaster@pioneer.arpa's message of 24 Aug 87 17:13:20 GMT

Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.36.1 of Fri Feb  6 1987 on rocky (berkeley-unix)



[My first entry to any usenet group... ]

I have been teaching the Lisp course here at SU for the past year.
It's been ``demoted'' to a course number of 022 (which puts it
somewhere below ``Computers for Cretins'').  I have had all sorts in
this course, from sophmores to 4th year grads in CS, EE, Linguistics,
Education, Philosophy, etc.  Some of these kids have next to no
programming experience, some have several years (some of these
``kids'' are also older than I am :-).

I had the very good fortune to have some TI Explorers that were given
to us & which weren't being used much (cf. donations to big name
schools).

With that as background, I would like to claim that I have found Lisp
to be a superb first language for my students.  I feel quite strongly
that by having a language as clear and concise as Lisp, with such
obvious semantics, the students' work is vastly reduced and the amount
of learning is proportionally increased.

A portion of this is due to the fact that there are no nasty little
syntax bugs popping up when the program gets compiled.

A portion of this is due to the fact that *everything* is right in front
of the student.  What was the value of that variable?  Look at it!  What
happened to the contents of that array?  It's still there.

A portion is due to there being no core dumps and no debuggers which
require the student to learn another new language at the same time.

Most of it, however, is due to Lisp being so clean, syntatically &
semantically, so that the student can really understand everything.

			****************

Well, that's some claim.  Here's some supporting evidence:


* All of the students could write significent recursive functions.

* (Some of) the students could write the Y-combinator on the final.

* All of them could write macros (only about 1/2 could deal with
  really significent ones, getting all the gensyms right).

* Most of them could explain the implementation of lists, symbols, and
  arrays, show how the garbage collector worked, and support a case for
  optimizing out tail recursion.


I consider this to show considerable knowledge of CS  ---  far more than
I am aware of students showing in other introductory courses (I sure
didn't know 1/4 of this after one quarter!).

Sure, the students are pretty good here.  I am a fantastic teacher too ;-)
Having good machines doesn't hurt, but the real power is in the language.
Once you really understand how something simple works, it's a hell of
alot easier to figure out the hard stuff.

-Bil

(Does USENET know the smiley face convetions?  Turn sideways and interpret
as humor/irony :-)
-- 
Yours sincerly, -Bil 
(aka Weird Bil)