On Tue, Feb 1, 2022 at 2:40 PM Clem Cole <clemc@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.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/teaching-fp-to-freshmen/ (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@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Feb 1, 2022 at 1:49 PM Clem Cole <clemc@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.