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I suppose it depends on how long that CS 101 course would be. At our department, we used to have an initial half-semester course that taught computational prob

by Athas 5y ago

I suppose it depends on how long that CS 101 course would be. At our department, we used to have an initial half-semester course that taught computational problem solving and programming using Standard ML. It was necessarily based on functional programming, although Standard ML is impure enough that we could also do simple IO. In the next course, they were taught object-oriented design and programming in Java. This has been replaced with a single course that uses F# (a multi-paradigm language) to teach a mixture of functional, imperative, and object-oriented techniques. It is not my impression that the students are left with a very clear conception of these ideas afterwards. Mostly they just seem to loathe F# - more than prior generations loathed Standard ML, even though F# is far more practical and has far better tools. There can be many reasons for this, but I think people completely new to programming do not have the maturity to juggle multiple paradigms within such a short period of time, and within the same language. Perhaps switching to a materially different language when switching concepts actually helps them, so they don't mix up things too much.

brundolf 5y ago
Interesting. I guess my thinking was that "paradigms" are mostly artifacts of a) history, and b) ways of describing ideas which at production scale may lend themselves better or worse to a given problem space (in terms of maintainability, etc), both of which are good to learn eventually, but neither of which matter that much when you're just trying to figure out what code is. But I guess when you're just trying to figure out what code is, it helps to be able to form very consistent and concrete understanding around basic atoms like "what is a variable?". So if a language has different syntaxes that look similar but don't follow the same rules, that could get bewildering fast. Especially in languages that have sprawled over time and have competing ways of doing the same things. Maybe the best answer is a language that was designed holistically to be cross-paradigm from the outset? In contrast with a kitchen-sink language that's gathered features over the years Edit: Another thought; there may be a distinction to be made between "mixed-paradigm" and "cross-paradigm", where one takes the best pieces from multiple paradigms and works them together into a complete whole, while the other just dumps multiple entire paradigms into the same language. Rust for example does a great job of mixing-and-matching without sprawling (not that it would necessarily be a good first language, but for the sake of example)
- igouy 5y ago
  > … a language that was designed holistically to be cross-paradigm from the outset? http://mozart2.org/mozart-v1/doc-1.4.0/tutorial/index.html http://mozart2.org/mozart-v1/doc-1.4.0/tutorial/index.html https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html

by Athas 5y ago

brundolf 5y ago

Interesting. I guess my thinking was that "paradigms" are mostly artifacts of a) history, and b) ways of describing ideas which at production scale may lend themselves better or worse to a given problem space (in terms of maintainability, etc), both of which are good to learn eventually, but neither of which matter that much when you're just trying to figure out what code is. But I guess when you're just trying to figure out what code is, it helps to be able to form very consistent and concrete understanding around basic atoms like "what is a variable?". So if a language has different syntaxes that look similar but don't follow the same rules, that could get bewildering fast. Especially in languages that have sprawled over time and have competing ways of doing the same things. Maybe the best answer is a language that was designed holistically to be cross-paradigm from the outset? In contrast with a kitchen-sink language that's gathered features over the years Edit: Another thought; there may be a distinction to be made between "mixed-paradigm" and "cross-paradigm", where one takes the best pieces from multiple paradigms and works them together into a complete whole, while the other just dumps multiple entire paradigms into the same language. Rust for example does a great job of mixing-and-matching without sprawling (not that it would necessarily be a good first language, but for the sake of example)

igouy 5y ago
> … a language that was designed holistically to be cross-paradigm from the outset? http://mozart2.org/mozart-v1/doc-1.4.0/tutorial/index.html http://mozart2.org/mozart-v1/doc-1.4.0/tutorial/index.html https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html