2 Feb
2022
2 Feb
'22
3:21 a.m.
On Tue, Feb 1, 2022 at 2:40 PM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
Dan - thanks.
Sure thing.
By the way: the thing I was thinking about earlier that was so biting
towards OOP was an earlier version of Harper's post, in which he writes,
"Object-oriented programming is eliminated entirely from the introductory
curriculum, because it is both anti-modular and anti-parallel by its very
nature, and hence unsuitable for a modern CS curriculum."
https://web.archive.org/web/20110321004746/https://existentialtype.wordpres…
(How's _that_ for an academic glove-slap?)
It would appear that language was softened to read "unsuitable for our
purposes" sometime in 2013, and then that rather inflammatory clause was
removed entirely by early March, 2015. I had read the original and felt
some schadenfreude.
- Dan C.
On Tue, Feb 1, 2022 at 2:10 PM Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 1, 2022 at 1:49 PM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
>
>> [snip]
>> FWIW: Through the 60s, the early and into the later 70s, CMU used to
>> call its 15-104 "Intro to Computer Programming" and was based on batch
>> (card) computing using FTN4, later WATFIV. They used a number of books.
>> The book I had was from Waterloo and other than being blue and black in
>> color, I remember little from it - since I already knew how and the TA let
>> me take 'self-taught' by turning in assignments/taking the tests
without
>> going to class. Like Freshman Physics and Calc, all intro science
>> and engineering majors were required to take it however, since the
>> engineering depts were sure what you would see when you graduated was FTN
>> based code [which was probably true for the more pure Science types].
>> Much later (many years after I left) the CS Dept finally convinced Mat
>> Sci, Chem E and Mech E to allow the course to be taught using Pascal. I
>> think they use either Java or Python now, but I haven't checked.
>>
>
> There was a bit of a stir about 10 years ago when CMU switched from Java
> (I think?) to Python and SML for introductory computer science education. I
> remember reading a report at the time, which I _think_ is this:
> http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/2010/CMU-CS-10-140.pdf
>
> Though perhaps not, because it _really_ bit into Java and the whole OOP
> thing.
>
> Robert Harper had a blog post that I found interesting about exposing
> freshmen to functional programming:
> https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/teaching-fp-to-freshmen/
>
> - Dan C.
>
>