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Well, people could easily lose interest if they come into the field wanting to be able to make computers do cool stuff, and they're stuck with circuits and bina

Well, people could easily lose interest if they come into the field wanting to be able to make computers do cool stuff, and they're stuck with circuits and binary for a while before even being able to do that. Those are fine coming later after learning at least some amount of higher-level code in which you can explore the potential of what you can make happen with programming. Being able to see some of your code make a simple game work or something; I feel like that's an important step. It's easy for us, already fully immersed, to say that beginners should or would be interested to know all of the logic gate-level mechanisms, but it's going to be off-putting for most.

jimmaswell 13y ago
It's like making someone learn music theory on paper before getting to try out an instrument
userbinator 13y ago
I consider it a "learning to walk before running" type of thing. It may not be interesting to a lot of beginners, many of which probably want to immediately start doing something "interesting", but these are the fundamental basics that anyone claiming to have a CS degree should know. Starting with higher-level languages tends to breed more misconceptions, because the students get used to seeing things "seem to work like this", and having only a vague, superficial understanding, it is much harder to unlearn these than to learn the truth in the beginning. It's also not as if things like logic, data representation, and the sequential nature of programs don't matter at higher levels --- whenever one uses conditional statements and loops, a good grasp of boolean logic is essential. Why numbers have a finite range, floating point values aren't exact, etc. all depend on knowing how data is represented. Not knowing these things will at best make it difficult to reason about code, and increase the chance of introducing bugs; at worst, it can lead to security flaws.

jimmaswell 13y ago

It's like making someone learn music theory on paper before getting to try out an instrument

userbinator 13y ago

I consider it a "learning to walk before running" type of thing. It may not be interesting to a lot of beginners, many of which probably want to immediately start doing something "interesting", but these are the fundamental basics that anyone claiming to have a CS degree should know. Starting with higher-level languages tends to breed more misconceptions, because the students get used to seeing things "seem to work like this", and having only a vague, superficial understanding, it is much harder to unlearn these than to learn the truth in the beginning. It's also not as if things like logic, data representation, and the sequential nature of programs don't matter at higher levels --- whenever one uses conditional statements and loops, a good grasp of boolean logic is essential. Why numbers have a finite range, floating point values aren't exact, etc. all depend on knowing how data is represented. Not knowing these things will at best make it difficult to reason about code, and increase the chance of introducing bugs; at worst, it can lead to security flaws.