On Oct 25, 7:47 am, Ruben Reusser <[email protected]> wrote: > It is amazing to me that the universities (at least the one close to our > office) does not force the students to learn all about the web while > learning how to program. Instead of a system.out.println("hello world"); it > might be a better idea to just start with a web based application first > (small servlet, printing out hello world or doing some computation, work > your way up to more interesting concepts). Starting in a web based world may > lead to better understanding of concurrency, etc. and at least the students > would not have to learn about web development once they graduate...
Much of the discussion seemed to be more about learning how computers work, as machines, rather than learning how to program. If my daughter ever shows any interest in programming, I'll start by teaching her Haskell. Hear that? That's the sound of 90% of the readers skipping the rest of this message because I used the H-word. Oh well. But Haskell gives the most explicit representation of what programs actually do, as apposed how the machine executes them. Anyone who plans to go professional will of course need to learn about von Neumann and libraries and platforms and all the rest of it, but that's the easy stuff, IMHO, and can be learned later. Anecdotal accounts suggest that non-programmers find Haskell easier to learn than most professional programmers, who can't help thinking in terms of twiddling bits in memory (e.g. http://projects.tmorris.net/public/how-to-learn-fp/artifacts/0.1/chunk-html/ar01s02s02.html). I've been trying to learn Haskell for some time. I've made a lot of progress, but I constantly have to remind myself that the code isn't being line-by-line executed as it is in imperative languages. It's very hard to let that idea go after all these years. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
