4 ms·

What courses or universities actually start with OOP? In my uni we started with functional programming (Scheme) and then went to C, only then we learned Java, C

by yoz-y 7y ago

What courses or universities actually start with OOP? In my uni we started with functional programming (Scheme) and then went to C, only then we learned Java, C++, Prolog and so on. In another uni when I supervised some exercise classes all students started with Python but using only imperative paradigm.

tolmasky 7y ago
In high school AP Computer Science uses Java (20 years ago when I was in high school, they were just transitioning off of C++). You can see what the earliest programmers are being taught here: https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/pdf/ap-computer-science-a-course-a-glance.pdf?course=ap-computer-science-a https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/pdf/ap-computer-science-a... Edit: When I was in HS, the AP CS courses (now there is only on since the second one was discontinued) used the "Marin Biology Case Study" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Computer_Science_A#Marine_Biology_case_study_(2000-2007) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Computer_Science_A#Marine_B... ). It has apparently been replaced with the "GridWorld" similar case study. I think it highlights one of the issues of OOP: a fascination with modeling, or perhaps over-modeling, the real world. Throughout the course you are expected to develop deep knowledge of a myriad of Fish and Fish Tank-related classes, which while perhaps an accurate preview into what working in an environment like Java is like, is not something that in my opinion succeeds in either exciting most students nor teaching them the "fundamentals" of algorithms and such. I think it can very much feel like a very complex and convoluted exercise in meeting the abstract goals of "categorizing" the world. Ironically, the insistence on modeling the world makes it feel frivolous and disconnected from any practical use -- which is incredibly sad since IMO CS could be the most practical math/science course you take. In my experience when you show kids the cool things that they can get computers to do for them, it can be more inspiring -- such problems do not lend themselves well to formalized class hierarchy drawing though.
- topkai22 7y ago
  They are back to two, and the new one appears much further down the “not only OOP” path. It’s more about the grand ideas of CS and less about programming. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Computer_Science_Principles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Computer_Science_Principl...
- Rapzid 7y ago
  Went through AP comp-sci 20 years ago too. We learned with C++ via DJGPP. Can't recall if the AP test was in C++ or pseudo code.. Certainly covered data structures, recursion, graph traversal, and etc. High School. Something to consider for those complaining about basic data structure questions in interviews :)
invalidOrTaken 7y ago
My university began with OOP. I had to discover FP myself! Uphill both ways!
- DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
  My uni had a semester-long course on Haskell which I took - but it was mostly about the syntax, understanding `foldr` and writing trivial programs - I can’t say I really learned anything from the experience - I guess because we never did any large-scale examples (I dare say “real-world examples”). Yes, we can do quicksort in 3 lines - but how can I use Haskell for an OLTP workload? How can I use Haskell to program a GUI? (More to the point: how do we reconcile the mental-model of a GUI (the canonical example of mutable OOP!) with Haskell’s immutability? Unrelated: Haskell needs a more approachable alternative syntax. People bash VB.NET - but it’s a great way to transition people from beginner and PHB-friendly languages (where people completely unfamiliar with a language can still generally understand what’s going on, like Fortran, COBOL, the BASIC family, etc) into an environment where the full .NET library is available before fully transitioning to the alien-seeming curly-braced C#. ...even as a C# programmer, I prefer writing functional-style code with immutable data. I’m not so far as to write the core of a program using Reactive Extensions - but things like Linq - for example.
  - Multicomp 7y ago
    Based on your last paragraph, it sounds like you are describing F#. F# is an immutable by default functional-first programming language in .net.
  - ferzul 7y ago
    module Main { IO<Void> main() { Integer n <- read$(getLine) // or: fmap(read)(getLine) print(fib(n)) } Integer fib(Integer n) { Integer go(Integer !n, Integer !a, Integer !b) { if (n==0) { return 0 } else { return go(n-1, b, a+b) } } } } pros: it looks plausibly like Java. cons: all the things that haskell syntax makes easy like partial application become obscure at best. omg, i'm dying in squiggly and round brackets, what is this, lisp? there's too much stuff that has to become ad hoc builtin syntax, like <$> becomes $(...). i don't know if you can program applicatively with this syntax, but i doubt you could have invented it.
pjmlp 7y ago
My degree in the mid-90's used Pascal on the first year, than moved into C++, which back on those days meant 2nd year students would all be implementing their own string, vector, list, double list, priority queue, ... classes. C was never though, it was thought to be mostly relevant for UNIX coding and students could anyway get into it via the C++ lectures. Then there was Prolog, Smalltalk, Lisp, Caml Ligh (OCaml's percursor), Algol, x86 and MIPS Assembly. Those that opted into compiler design/software engineering lectures also got into a myriad of other programming languages even if only as overview of what used to exist out there, namely Ada, Eiffel, Sather, Oberon, BETA, PL/I,...
DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
Don’t most university courses worldwide start with Java - or use Java as a mainstay? There are practical benefits: everyone knows it, it’s easy to learn (the language, while the library is straightforward too), and there’s a huge ecosystem. ...and it’s OOP. Back when I was finishing HS and touring ~5-6 different universities - every single one said they used Java - one said they were about to switch to teaching most of their first two years using JavaScript (this was a few years before NodeJS was even released so the notion of using JavaScript as a serious didactical language wasn’t taken seriously by me.
- p1esk 7y ago
  In my school currently they offer intro to programming in Python. For those who already know the basics the first course is using C. The next one is C++ and after that Java.
- repsilat 7y ago
  It rings true to me, at least in CS and especially software engineering. In mathematics, physics and "real engineering" departments I haven't seen it at all, though, and my experience may date me. It was my first semester of university programming in '05. Anecdotally, I wasn't as bothered by "public static void main string args" as I was by - Starting execution in MyClass.main, - Instantiating a MyClass, then - Calling MyClass.run(). That took some head-scratching. It's an argument against Java as an introductory language, but not much of one, because "Just ignore that bit until CS102" (or forever if you're never going to do another CS paper) actually works pretty well.
  - DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
    > It rings true to me, at least in CS and especially software engineering. In mathematics, physics and "real engineering" departments I haven't seen it at all, though, and my experience may date me. Ah - yes. My friends at uni doing physics said they had to learn C++ - but only enough to write simple C-style programs and using simple classes without going into OOP design, design patterns, and large-scale concerns (I guess because they were all using some physics tool, and I understand it's good for interfacing with Fortran too). My friends doing EE (excluding those doing embedded work) said they all had to do Matlab, some friends doing mathematics reported the same. EE people also said they did some C too.
bitwize 7y ago
Today, Java and, increasingly, JavaScript have supplanted the Pascal, BASIC, and C kids in the past started with. Scheme is cursed. No one wants to teach it, especially to beginners. MIT abandoned it in favor of Python for its introductory course more than a decade ago, and even the Racket folks are backpedaling hard on Lisp syntax, proposing a conventional infix syntax as the default for Racket2.

by yoz-y 7y ago

tolmasky 7y ago

In high school AP Computer Science uses Java (20 years ago when I was in high school, they were just transitioning off of C++). You can see what the earliest programmers are being taught here: https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/pdf/ap-computer-science-a-course-a-glance.pdf?course=ap-computer-science-a https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/pdf/ap-computer-science-a... Edit: When I was in HS, the AP CS courses (now there is only on since the second one was discontinued) used the "Marin Biology Case Study" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Computer_Science_A#Marine_Biology_case_study_(2000-2007) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Computer_Science_A#Marine_B... ). It has apparently been replaced with the "GridWorld" similar case study. I think it highlights one of the issues of OOP: a fascination with modeling, or perhaps over-modeling, the real world. Throughout the course you are expected to develop deep knowledge of a myriad of Fish and Fish Tank-related classes, which while perhaps an accurate preview into what working in an environment like Java is like, is not something that in my opinion succeeds in either exciting most students nor teaching them the "fundamentals" of algorithms and such. I think it can very much feel like a very complex and convoluted exercise in meeting the abstract goals of "categorizing" the world. Ironically, the insistence on modeling the world makes it feel frivolous and disconnected from any practical use -- which is incredibly sad since IMO CS could be the most practical math/science course you take. In my experience when you show kids the cool things that they can get computers to do for them, it can be more inspiring -- such problems do not lend themselves well to formalized class hierarchy drawing though.

topkai22 7y ago
They are back to two, and the new one appears much further down the “not only OOP” path. It’s more about the grand ideas of CS and less about programming. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Computer_Science_Principles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Computer_Science_Principl...
Rapzid 7y ago
Went through AP comp-sci 20 years ago too. We learned with C++ via DJGPP. Can't recall if the AP test was in C++ or pseudo code.. Certainly covered data structures, recursion, graph traversal, and etc. High School. Something to consider for those complaining about basic data structure questions in interviews :)

invalidOrTaken 7y ago

My university began with OOP. I had to discover FP myself! Uphill both ways!

DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
My uni had a semester-long course on Haskell which I took - but it was mostly about the syntax, understanding `foldr` and writing trivial programs - I can’t say I really learned anything from the experience - I guess because we never did any large-scale examples (I dare say “real-world examples”). Yes, we can do quicksort in 3 lines - but how can I use Haskell for an OLTP workload? How can I use Haskell to program a GUI? (More to the point: how do we reconcile the mental-model of a GUI (the canonical example of mutable OOP!) with Haskell’s immutability? Unrelated: Haskell needs a more approachable alternative syntax. People bash VB.NET - but it’s a great way to transition people from beginner and PHB-friendly languages (where people completely unfamiliar with a language can still generally understand what’s going on, like Fortran, COBOL, the BASIC family, etc) into an environment where the full .NET library is available before fully transitioning to the alien-seeming curly-braced C#. ...even as a C# programmer, I prefer writing functional-style code with immutable data. I’m not so far as to write the core of a program using Reactive Extensions - but things like Linq - for example.
- Multicomp 7y ago
  Based on your last paragraph, it sounds like you are describing F#. F# is an immutable by default functional-first programming language in .net.
- ferzul 7y ago
  module Main { IO<Void> main() { Integer n <- read$(getLine) // or: fmap(read)(getLine) print(fib(n)) } Integer fib(Integer n) { Integer go(Integer !n, Integer !a, Integer !b) { if (n==0) { return 0 } else { return go(n-1, b, a+b) } } } } pros: it looks plausibly like Java. cons: all the things that haskell syntax makes easy like partial application become obscure at best. omg, i'm dying in squiggly and round brackets, what is this, lisp? there's too much stuff that has to become ad hoc builtin syntax, like <$> becomes $(...). i don't know if you can program applicatively with this syntax, but i doubt you could have invented it.

pjmlp 7y ago

My degree in the mid-90's used Pascal on the first year, than moved into C++, which back on those days meant 2nd year students would all be implementing their own string, vector, list, double list, priority queue, ... classes. C was never though, it was thought to be mostly relevant for UNIX coding and students could anyway get into it via the C++ lectures. Then there was Prolog, Smalltalk, Lisp, Caml Ligh (OCaml's percursor), Algol, x86 and MIPS Assembly. Those that opted into compiler design/software engineering lectures also got into a myriad of other programming languages even if only as overview of what used to exist out there, namely Ada, Eiffel, Sather, Oberon, BETA, PL/I,...

DaiPlusPlus 7y ago

Don’t most university courses worldwide start with Java - or use Java as a mainstay? There are practical benefits: everyone knows it, it’s easy to learn (the language, while the library is straightforward too), and there’s a huge ecosystem. ...and it’s OOP. Back when I was finishing HS and touring ~5-6 different universities - every single one said they used Java - one said they were about to switch to teaching most of their first two years using JavaScript (this was a few years before NodeJS was even released so the notion of using JavaScript as a serious didactical language wasn’t taken seriously by me.

p1esk 7y ago
In my school currently they offer intro to programming in Python. For those who already know the basics the first course is using C. The next one is C++ and after that Java.
repsilat 7y ago
It rings true to me, at least in CS and especially software engineering. In mathematics, physics and "real engineering" departments I haven't seen it at all, though, and my experience may date me. It was my first semester of university programming in '05. Anecdotally, I wasn't as bothered by "public static void main string args" as I was by - Starting execution in MyClass.main, - Instantiating a MyClass, then - Calling MyClass.run(). That took some head-scratching. It's an argument against Java as an introductory language, but not much of one, because "Just ignore that bit until CS102" (or forever if you're never going to do another CS paper) actually works pretty well.
- DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
  > It rings true to me, at least in CS and especially software engineering. In mathematics, physics and "real engineering" departments I haven't seen it at all, though, and my experience may date me. Ah - yes. My friends at uni doing physics said they had to learn C++ - but only enough to write simple C-style programs and using simple classes without going into OOP design, design patterns, and large-scale concerns (I guess because they were all using some physics tool, and I understand it's good for interfacing with Fortran too). My friends doing EE (excluding those doing embedded work) said they all had to do Matlab, some friends doing mathematics reported the same. EE people also said they did some C too.

bitwize 7y ago

Today, Java and, increasingly, JavaScript have supplanted the Pascal, BASIC, and C kids in the past started with. Scheme is cursed. No one wants to teach it, especially to beginners. MIT abandoned it in favor of Python for its introductory course more than a decade ago, and even the Racket folks are backpedaling hard on Lisp syntax, proposing a conventional infix syntax as the default for Racket2.