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The intro to programming course for the math department at my University was taught in Haskell. And it was really interesting to see how people who had never pr
by dagw 5y ago
The intro to programming course for the math department at my University was taught in Haskell. And it was really interesting to see how people who had never programmed before on the whole did better than those who had a bit of programming experience.
Those that had programmed before kept trying to make Haskell behave how they thought a programming language 'should' behave, while those who had never programmed just looked at Haskell and went "I guess this is what programming is" and just rolled with it.
The only problem was that once they moved onto the intermediate course, taught in Java, they where completely lost again.
- scns 5y agoIntroduction to Programming at CMU is done in SML. They make the same observations as you. Those that have prior exposure to programming struggle. Those students without experience find it easy. They are a bit baffled in the next course, which is done in an imperative language.
- rgrmrts 5y ago15-150 (during my time), but it wasn’t the intro to programming - the course is titled “introduction to functional programming”. The intro to programming is Python (unless it changed). The trajectory for students is Python to C to SML (15-110 to 15-122 to 15-150). Some people take the C and SML courses in the same semester. I was really happy to have been introduced to many different paradigms over the course of a few years. But to both your points, once we moved on to Java I had a really bad time.