On Jan 28, 2008, at 8:53 AM, Andre Roberge wrote:
> 2008/1/28 Jan Ulrich Hasecke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: >> Was it already posted here? >> >> http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/CrossTalk/2008/01/0801DewarSchonberg.html >> > > No, it was not posted (afaik). Thanks for the link. > > I find it interesting that no attention seems to be given to the fact > that a language like Python provides a "clean" and natural translation > of algorithms - when one focus on explaining a certain algorithm and > demonstrating its use, it would seem natural to avoid having to deal > with syntactical obfuscation. > > Then again, given the authors professional attachment ("Adacore"), it > is not entirely surprising that emphasis is given to Ada... > > André > >> juh I ran across another article that quoted him recently (it was linked in the three times a week ACM news email earlier this month). http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/career/article.php/3722876 While I agree with some of what he says, I don't think there is any harm in teaching a "simpler/higher level" language in the first course as long as students are exposed to lower level languages in other courses. We have found that Python is great for beginners and then we teach our students C++ in our two algorithms and data structures courses. This lets our students focus on problem solving in the first course w/o worrying about the more complex syntax of C++ (and we can write more interesting assignments in CS1 with Python). In the second course we then transition to C++ so students learn a lower level language and need to understand memory management. I think the combination of these two languages (one that provides rich data structures and does memory management and one that essentially requires you to write everything from scratch) gives students a great background no matter what language they will need to learn to use in their careers. Dave David M. Reed, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Computer Science Capital University [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://capital2.capital.edu/faculty/dreed _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
