Matthew Flatt (at Utah, advisee of Matthias) teaches the same way. He emphasizes test-driven development and formal methods for designing a program that will wo

Matthew Flatt (at Utah, advisee of Matthias) teaches the same way. He emphasizes test-driven development and formal methods for designing a program that will work. One of my favorite tricks I picked up was to write the header comment for a function before writing any of the code. Once you've written down what the function is meant to do, it's often almost trivial to actually implement. (This is especially helpful when first learning recursion, as I was when I took the class.)