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My university started the introductory course (for all majors, courses were common for the first 2 years) with scheme and most student seemed to understand it f

by gommm 18y ago

My university started the introductory course (for all majors, courses were common for the first 2 years) with scheme and most student seemed to understand it fairly well. We still had the 20% that were extremely fast because of having programming experience before (but learning scheme was a nice change compared to what they used to do) but the numbers of students completely lost seemed rather small. So I think scheme is a very good choice for an introductory course... Ruby is very nice (I'm mainly programming in it nowadays) but I'm not sure it's such a good choice for beginners, there are a lot of small details that could trip up beginners I think (block vs procs vs lambda vs method(:name_of_method), the eigenclass...)

gaius 18y ago
The problem with Scheme is that it's very difficult to learn in a vacuum. You can do all sorts of interesting things with it, but if people can't use it to do real work then they quickly lose interest (I'm not talking about CS types who are interested in computing anyway, but others who would fine programming a useful skill in their "real" jobs). From that POV the best teaching language is something like VBA, awful tho' it is, because it gets people from zero to "look what I did!" very quickly. Or MATLAB or some other language that's looked down on by purists.