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Some people think in dependency graphs. But it's much more common for people to think in steps. I put two apples in the cart, the cart has two apples; I put two
by btown 8y ago
Some people think in dependency graphs. But it's much more common for people to think in steps. I put two apples in the cart, the cart has two apples; I put two more apples in the cart, it has 4. Something like Racket that forces you to think about what you want, rather than helping you iterate to get there, is going to be harder to teach to new programmers unless they already have this type of thinking experience from advanced mathematics etc. It's possible that the class wasn't primed to learn functional programming before imperative programming.
- adjkant 8y agoI think the idea is that a course using Racket or one of its teaching language has to teach that style of thinking, and any course that doesn't teach it will be doomed to fail. HtDP is a great example of how to do it right, which puts the design process in steps rather than the programming steps. I suspect the parent comment failed in this aspect of the course.
- acbart 8y agoPossibly. Of course, there is little evidence that the HtDP curriculum "does it right" while all others fail to do so. It seems to have a strong cult following, with little evidence to back up its touted advantages over other approaches.
- adjkant 8y agoI never said all others first of all, I just know that's one example I have a lot of positive firsthand experience with. Generally as well it's not like curriculum approaches have any evidence either way, so while there may not be evidence, I would ask what curriculum does have evidence that it's better than another. I've done some digging explicitly in that area and there's really no good evidence for anything from language choice, object oriented vs functional, everything. Not surprisingly either, it's quite the hard problem to solve and get rid of bias towards one approach in a study to start with. I'd say this though - a "cult" following I would note as a likely symptom of a good curriculum, one that does such a good job that it inspires those that go through it to advocate for it strongly. Is that not itself evidence of some indirect sort? I'd say it's better than most out there. In terms of its advantages, I think a reasonable person can decide if both the advantage is actually an advantage and at least gauge how a curriculum fares on executing on the advantage. For example, the ramping up of difficulty from the teaching languages. Instead of saying "theres little evidence", I would go through the curriculum and its advantages (and disadvantages) like that.