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As I understand you advocate a bottom - up approach rather than a top-down one. I personally prefer the former over the latter as it makes more sense to me to l
by cassepipe 4y ago
As I understand you advocate a bottom - up approach rather than a top-down one. I personally prefer the former over the latter as it makes more sense to me to learn how to make basic programs work before I learn what incredible things I can do with them. I have over one year of C experience in my school doing things like rewriting functions of the C stdlib and reimplementin getline() before I learn about radix sort, implement a tree or make a basic ray tracer. Thats works for me but I know there are some theory/abstraction oriented people that like to learn about algorithms first and fill in the details late. In the end if you want programming to be interesting you need both practical and theoretical knowledge so I guess you should know yourself and take the approach that work for you. Having people who want to build stuff learn abstract concepts in Scheme may be as counter-productive than having people who want to learn about clever data structures learn how to make a basic text editor in C in the terminal.
- bb88 4y agoI have no argument there. But let's look at some actual data. https://www.registrar.iastate.edu/resources/enrollment-statistics/enrollment-by-major-or-department https://www.registrar.iastate.edu/resources/enrollment-stati... In around 1995ish ISU moved to Scheme for their first level course, because they wanted to follow the MIT example. At about 2000/2001 they had a healthy number of students in both the computer-science and pre-computer science programs. The problem you can see in the data is converting the pre-computer science majors to computer science. You can see that most just dropped. Again you could say that maybe SICP should be a weed-out course, but the reality is, you can be a professional programmer without SICP. Yes SICP might be a nice to have for certain problem domains, but most people aren't functional programmers, and don't need to be. Today, at ISU functional programming is a 300 level course, and the computer science program has 866 registered students for Fall of 2022.
- bb88 4y agoI left out the fact that around 2007/2008ish (right around when SICP was phased out of MIT) Computer science enrollments dropped to ~100ish.