3 ms·

To quote a fellow TA below: “I am currently a TA for 15-122 at Carnegie Mellon, the class that C0 was originally made for. I would argue that C0 does an excell

To quote a fellow TA below: “I am currently a TA for 15-122 at Carnegie Mellon, the class that C0 was originally made for. I would argue that C0 does an excellent job at breeding good programmers because of the following features: 1. Contracts in C0 bake preconditions, post conditions, and loop invariants right into the language. Contracts are only checked when in "dynamic recompilation" mode (basically debug mode). This allows you to check the correctness of your code more easily (and, importantly, in an easily gradable way). 2. The language is designed in such a way to introduce C to programmers that are used to other higher level languages. In the C0 phase of the course we introduce students to fundamental concepts like memory allocation, code reasoning and contracts, binary representations of numbers, and unit testing. Next we transition to C1 (included in the C0 install) which introduces typedefs and other features of C. At this point we focus on introducing data structures. Finally we make the final transition to C, where we talk about undefined behavior, gcc, stack vs heap, etc. I've taken this course myself, and I would argue that this measured approach to learning C is far superior to throwing students (most of whom have no low-level programming experience) straight into C.”

grayhatter 9y ago
>I've taken this course myself, and I would argue that this measured approach to learning C is far superior to throwing students (most of whom have no low-level programming experience) straight into C. Sure, I'd love to read this argument. I taught myself to program, started with python, then learned C. The hurdle of learning how memory is mapped, the knowledge/understanding gained by being required to clean up after yourself when you do *alloc. That's what makes learning C helpful. Perhaps I gave up reading the introduction to soon, but honestly, after I read it adds in GC to C.... I had the same reaction everyone else has already voiced. "Why use C here?" There's many other better languages if your just adding in hand holding. Finally, if grading assignments was one of the defining reasons for inventing a new language, you need to take a step back from the text editor, and ask... "How did I get here?"
- stuffaandthings 9y ago
  Just wanna add that we used C0 for a subset of the class, and most of the students jump into a more rigorous course which involves actually implementing malloc. I agree with you that learning the ins and outs of memory is super important, but the methodology of this course doesn't imply the lack of teaching memory management
fpig 9y ago
I guess I have no idea what I'm talking about here as I honestly don't know anything about teaching and my own experience is atypical (around 8 years programming by the time I started college). So my comment is basically noise I guess. As long as you eventually require them to understand how things actually work and that code execution, memory management, etc isn't black magic, they should be fine.

grayhatter 9y ago

>I've taken this course myself, and I would argue that this measured approach to learning C is far superior to throwing students (most of whom have no low-level programming experience) straight into C. Sure, I'd love to read this argument. I taught myself to program, started with python, then learned C. The hurdle of learning how memory is mapped, the knowledge/understanding gained by being required to clean up after yourself when you do *alloc. That's what makes learning C helpful. Perhaps I gave up reading the introduction to soon, but honestly, after I read it adds in GC to C.... I had the same reaction everyone else has already voiced. "Why use C here?" There's many other better languages if your just adding in hand holding. Finally, if grading assignments was one of the defining reasons for inventing a new language, you need to take a step back from the text editor, and ask... "How did I get here?"

stuffaandthings 9y ago
Just wanna add that we used C0 for a subset of the class, and most of the students jump into a more rigorous course which involves actually implementing malloc. I agree with you that learning the ins and outs of memory is super important, but the methodology of this course doesn't imply the lack of teaching memory management

fpig 9y ago

I guess I have no idea what I'm talking about here as I honestly don't know anything about teaching and my own experience is atypical (around 8 years programming by the time I started college). So my comment is basically noise I guess. As long as you eventually require them to understand how things actually work and that code execution, memory management, etc isn't black magic, they should be fine.