On 11 Jan 2011 18:56, "Amihay Zer-Kavod" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> By the way, about the main problem. Scala has a nice (but not very
> recommended) workaround:
>
That's due to change in the very near future.
Enhancements scheduled for the imminent 2.9 release mean that this will soon
be the officially recommended way to create an application...
> object Main extends Application {
> println("Hello World!")
> }
>
> By extending Application the code inside the class curly brackets is
> activated automatically.
> It hides all the details and boiler-plating of the main method.
> I find it kind of nit and keeps the students focused at the main point
> of activating the code they write.
>
> On Dec 31 2010, 1:05 am, Nick Brown <[email protected]> wrote:
> > First, a disclaimer, this may end up as a bit of a rant.
> > I was listening to the listener feedback episode on my drive home from
> > the holidays the other day, and the discussion on computer science
> > education interested me. I'd like to share a conversation I had with
> > several CS professors a few years back.
> > As a Virginia Tech alum, I was asked by my employer (IBM) to represent
> > the company at an ACM programming conference we were co-sponsoring, at
> > which VT and a number of smaller schools in the region were
> > competing. I was talking with a few professors from some of those
> > smaller schools about how they went about teaching the discipline and
> > the topic of what programming language should be taught was brought
> > up. One professor mentioned that he would really like to teach his
> > intro classes using Lisp (I think it was Stallman who said even if you
> > never use Lisp, it's still useful to learn it because it will teach
> > you a lot about computer science in general), but couldn't because it
> > would be impossible to get students to take it then. I (in the
> > position as a programmer in a corporate setting) mentioned that
> > wouldn't be such a bad thing, as it would help filter out students who
> > probably should major in something else. Well, the professors were
> > all horrified at that notion. Enrollment was already dangerously low,
> > they told me, so doing something like that would ensure they would be
> > out of a job in no time. Maybe a large, well known CS program could
> > take a risk like that, but these were all professors at small private
> > schools. The lesson I got from that was that in order for a CS
> > program to be successful, unless you are MIT, it has to be very
> > accessible. It can't just target those who will eventually be the
> > über-programmers we want to be our co-workers.
> > At first I thought this was the wrong way to go about it as this
> > targets quantity over quality of our future software engineers, but I
> > suppose they do have a point. Not everyone taking intro to comp sci
> > is going to be a software engineer, just as not everyone taking intro
> > to biology is going to be a biologist. In fact, it is becoming more
> > and more important for members of other disciplines (especially,
> > though not limited to, engineering and the sciences) to learn at least
> > some CS. They won't have to write huge, multi-layer applications, but
> > they may well need to write a short script to accomplish something on
> > a computer.
> > So as Bio 101 doesn't usually start out with teaching the complicated
> > organic chemistry that is the heart of all biology, CS 101 also needs
> > to start out at a much higher level of abstraction. And what is the
> > most natural abstraction of CS? Well, depending on who you talk to,
> > either objects or functions. I would personally side with functions,
> > but much of that is tainted by how many problems arise with the common
> > modern implementations of OOP. Functions are familiar, not just to
> > mathematicians, but to anyone who as taken an algebra class. And the
> > use of functional programming is not just useful to those who are
> > working on massively distributed programming, but also to a scientist
> > who needs to write a script to perform some computation of their data,
> > or an engineer who needs to run calculations to test their design. In
> > fact, anyone who has used grep should have no problem defending the
> > utility of functional programming.
> > Of course those students who (most likely well after taking CS 101)
> > decide to specialize in it and become software engineers will need to
> > learn a lot more, such as the internals of how all this "magic" stuff
> > they used in their beginning classes really work. But I don't think
> > that would be any more difficult than learning cellular biology or
> > organic chem after having a high level overview of biology.
> > So I suppose this is just a long-winded message about how whoever it
> > was (I think Tor) who was arguing that you need to start at the bottom
> > and learn up was wrong
> >
> > Oh, and regarding the original listener feedback about using JUnit to
> > launch programs for beginning students, I guess I have mixed feelings
> > about it. One one hand, I worry that if students first see JUnit as
> > just a way to launch "Hello World", they may have difficulty switching
> > over to using it for real unit tests (I suppose I don't have an
> > argument for that, its just more of a gut feeling more than anything
> > else). On the other hand, I think using JUnit as it is intended would
> > be very useful. If they write a program to compute the nth Fibonacci
> > number, instead of exercising it in int main(...), write a JUnit for
> > it.
>
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