On Wednesday, December 18, 2002, at 04:29 am, Linda McIver wrote:
I strongly encourage you to try. I tried that approach for ten or twelve years (there was even a book, Programming from First Principles, a brief comet in the 80s). The course was based on Landin's ISWIM, with sidetracks to cover transcription into 'real' languages. Unfortunately I drove myself up a formalist cul-de-sac and staff plus student resistance killed off any further experiments.She presented research at the 12th PPIG workshop, and has come up with a wonderful idea: the Zero-th programming language: "The language, GRAIL, is designed to be used *before* the first programming course, to enable students to become familiar with programming concepts with the attendent need to grapple with the syntactic and semantic complexities of a full modern programming language." http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~lindap/research.htmlThe idea might be pedagogically sound (no doubt that will be contentious :), but it's not necessarily politically sound. It's very difficult to convince departments, and indeed students, to take on a non-industry-relevant language as part of a computing degree, even short-term.It would be nice to have evidence that students who are given such a language as their short-term introductory language end up being better programmers, but the ethical considerations of trying to test such a theory in a single course are probably insurmountable, and testing across courses/institutions generally involves too many variables to give conclusive results.
I now feel, prompted by what may have been a casual remark of Thomas Green's ("people don't learn like that") that delivery method may count more than curriculum. Floundering around in my cul-de-sac, I've recently had what feels like success in teaching formal logic with lots of paper and pencil practice and lab support with a symbolic calculator. Back in the old PfFP days we believed in pencil and paper as an aid to reflection; perhaps one day I'll get it to work.
My own feeling about Java and the like is that it must be harder to learn to program in a notation which relies for its power on a vast unspecified and barely described library. It's programming in a language with 5000 instructions which nobody understands, whereas poor old C has about five which everybody understands.
Richard Bornat
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