4 ms·

I'd rather see C taught than Scheme. Hardware matters, and a good CS-education should be centered in languages that recognize that. Software engineering, on th

• javanix 17y ago
  C would be my first preference as well, but I also appreciate that Scheme (or another functional language) would provide better opportunities than C or Java for students to learn more "advanced" algorithmic techniques such as recursion. The problem with Java (and C, to a lesser extent) in basic problem solving is that you can almost brute-force-code and get a working solution that will get full credit, but after writing it a more elegant (and efficient) solution isn't always obvious. In functional languages, that "more correct" solution almost always seems to stand out more, at least to me.
  • sketerpot 17y ago
    Recursion is only considered an "advanced" algorithmic technique because people are taught to think of it that way. Recursion is actually pretty straightforward once you have a bit of practice using it.
    • javanix 17y ago
      Well, yes, most things do become easier with a bit of practice. If a functional language was taught in beginner CS classes I think it would be easier for students to see how it works. It certainly "clicked" for me once I'd learned a bit of Scheme in my first AI class.
      • Locke1689 17y ago
        Intro CS courses at MIT, CMU, and Northwestern are taught in Scheme.
        • scott_s 17y ago
          MIT recently switched to Python. That fact is the other favorite cause for this discussion.
• Locke1689 17y ago
  They should learn both. Any CS student who does not understand simple hardware concepts such as page faults does not deserve a degree. Similarly, every CS student should learn functional and imperative programming. Period.
  • sfphotoarts 17y ago
    But this would produce a generation of students that know how to do things that we already know how to do really well already. Maybe it would be better if we skipped page faults and taught things that would advance CS. CS has moved on to more interesting areas that simple page faults. Think about how massively parallel systems run, or how distributed databases handle consistency, or high volume scaling, or NLP or any of the other areas of CS that are far more interesting that page faults. Language details are all academic, pointless debates to be had by people who like one over another where the differences are often trivial (C++/Java). If you have a great mind and can understand what languages are doing then either will do you just fine. I'd rather not teach the next generation of CS under-graduates the same old stuff that I did (and yes that included how the VAX-11/750 - one of the first to do so if I recall correctly - didn't have to have all a programs data or code in memory...) Teach them things that will take CS forward...
    • seabee 17y ago
      You need to understand what has come before so that you can build upon it effectively. Taking past progress for granted will not help develop the future; if anything, you'll get a lot more reinvented wheels. Among the higher-level problems you mentioned, how many of them are interrelated? I'd rather see professors cover material that is useful in 80% of cases, even if they are well-trodden topics - students can specialise in the rest. In my CS course (UK) we studied parallel systems, including MapReduce; distributed databases and NLP can be studied optionally along with several other topics of much higher level than mere page faults. That said, not all CS courses are created equal.
      • sfphotoarts 17y ago
        simply not true. you do not need to understand how your compiler works, or how De Morgans law is responsible for all those NOT gates in your CPU to produce useful and meaningful CS.