On Tuesday, 12 March 2024 at 19:07:25 UTC, M.M. wrote:
I was always wondering about this debate on a suitable "first" programming language in a CS curriculum. I largely observe one dividing point: to start with a strongly-typed language or not. (After that, it probably does not matter so much which language is chosen; alas, it should be available on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS). Do you observe similar sentiment in the discussions in the university settings?
I'm not a CS person so I'll have to defer to others (their needs are very different). My grad students are doing more complicated programming for data analysis and simulation. I focus on recursion and using a functional programming approach, because that simplifies things so much for these types of problems. All I need is a language that supports that.
