Thanks for the link, Bjorn, but I don't believe that that's the concern. Most of the scientists and engineers that I know who program use C, Fortran, MATLAB, Python, or Perl. Most CS1's that I've ever heard of use C++, Java, Visual Basic, or Scheme. The emptiness of that interaction set is amazing and depressing. If you can convince the scientists and engineers to use Fortress, then the students would be interested, too. But it's hard to convince the students of the authenticity of a language without practitioner, researcher, or professor use.
Mark -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bjorn Reese Sent: Tuesday, October 31, 2006 11:39 AM To: discuss@ppig.org Subject: Re: SV: PPIG discuss: long term effect of introductory programming education Guzdial, Mark wrote: > The teachers using these approaches complain that our traditional > introductory courses don't prepare students for science learning. > They care more about representation (e.g., how you represent a vector > is critical for the kinds of algorithms that you write in physics), > floating point limitations, and iterative methods, and less about type > safety and object orientation. These teachers also complain that they Maybe they should be taught domain-specific programming languages, rather than general-purpose programming languages. In this particular case it sounds like they might be interested in Fortress: http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List (discuss@ppig.org) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List (discuss@ppig.org) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
