acbart

16 ms·

151.
by acbart 7y ago
First, let me say I appreciate your lengthy response and your relative neutrality on this. Sometimes, when encountering folks who disagree with my opinions on this, things get a little heated. Case in point - I am very aware of what the per
152.
by acbart 7y ago
I used a default theme from Github, and then did my best to make it a little more mobile-friendly. However, I wanted to focus on the content and, you know, my actual job, instead of spending hours fixing CSS. Perhaps consider taking that en
153.
by acbart 7y ago
I love SICP, great ideas. Keep in mind I'm talking about your first real coding experience. You were a self-taught developer, right? Perhaps I'm over-inferring, but it sounds like you hit the curriculum right when you needed it.
154.
by acbart 7y ago
You are correct! I considered whether I needed to make this distinction more clearly. I'm strictly talking about this approach (language and/or curriculum) being used in CS1. I actually have a lot of love for Racket itself - compo
155.
by acbart 7y ago
> Industry is moving towards FP. ... Citation required. My dad will be writing COBOL till the day he dies, and most of those lines of business logic in Java will bit rot before they get converted to Scala/Haskell/Something else
156.
by acbart 7y ago
I taught Racket last fall, and failed to find any major ongoing projects or products I could talk about with the students. It's really only used educational contexts and within its academic research cult, it seems to me. And the number
157.
by acbart 7y ago
And before any says it, yes, I do love the idea of students EVENTUALLY learning a Lisp/Racket kind of language before they graduate. I would even be happy with an entire course dedicated to it. But I don't want that to be the CS1.
158.
by acbart 7y ago
Well, I'm pretty sure this is going to go badly for me in the end, but I might as well leave this here: https://ihateracket.com
159.
by acbart 7y ago
Man, VPL is the weirdest combination of old and new. It works, though, I'll give it credit for that.
160.
by acbart 7y ago
Yes, the learning objectives are all still relevant and will outlast me. I meant that the materials themselves are old and do not represent what's really going on in CS Education, from my perspective.
161.
by acbart 7y ago
I mean, obviously. No one's going to seriously advocate removing systems programming from the core introductory sequence of undergraduate CS degrees. The learning objectives are still relevant, I meant the materials themselves are old.
162.
by acbart 7y ago
Why is this being posted? I suppose it's interesting from a historical perspective, for what is available. This is so far removed from modern CS Ed that it's an interesting little time capsule, I guess.
163.
by acbart 7y ago
> Racket, as a full-featured dialect of Lisp, has an aggressively simple syntax. For a small fraction of students, this syntax is an impediment. To be blunt, if these students have a fundamental mental barrier to accepting an alien synta
164.
by acbart 7y ago
Well, they're probably a little biased towards using Python, since they have the former BDFL just lying around :)
165.
by acbart 7y ago
Well, it's a virtual server, so I'm not sure how that plays with things. I supposed getting more servers in play would help, but that feels more like throwing hardware at a software problem. It doesn't feel like JH should hav
166.
by acbart 7y ago
I'm not as up on the details as you'd probably want, but my understanding is that we're running it on a virtual server with a nice chunk of RAM and CPU locally at VT. I don't think we want to be at all reliant on externa
167.
by acbart 7y ago
I love JupyterHub, but we've hit some real headaches in having it scale. At Virginia Tech, we have an introductory course for non-computing majors where students are using Jupyter through JH. At around the 70-student mark, we have perf
168.
by acbart 8y ago
It's true, but that will have to change if they want to start handling the volume of students we're being asked to handle.
169.
by acbart 8y ago
The major crisis in university CS Ed is that there are nowhere NEAR enough qualified professors to teach all the subjects. There will not be enough in the next 5 years, assuming there is no radical change in qualification expectations. Ther
170.
by acbart 8y ago
> I will say that the people who develop HTDP are the some of the people who spend the most time writing about pedagogy in computing education. I don't think that's really true. Yes, the HTDP community, and Felleisen in particu
171.
by acbart 8y ago
Everyone on here is very excited about HTDP. You are mostly very smart people, and not representative of the typical CS student starting off. Many of you are driven and have rich STEM backgrounds that you draw upon. Therefore, I want to poi
172.
by acbart 8y ago
CS Education venues never show up on these lists. In some cases, it's intentional and in others it's accidental. Either way, I wonder if we'll ever see the same respect as our peers in CS. It's a weird spot to be in.
173.
by acbart 8y ago
Possibly. Of course, there is little evidence that the HtDP curriculum "does it right" while all others fail to do so. It seems to have a strong cult following, with little evidence to back up its touted advantages over other appr
174.
by acbart 8y ago
Thank you for your advice. I am not going to do that. I have talked to many professors over the past decade who are successful in teaching the class.
175.
by acbart 8y ago
Always a strong possibility. Although since I've always received high evaluations in the past, I'm not sure that's a good hypothesis.
176.
by acbart 8y ago
I just finished teaching Racket for 2/3 of the semester. I have never had a group of students hate their introductory programming experience the way that they did with Racket. 0/10 will never teach Racket again the rest of my life
177.
by acbart 8y ago
Trivially reducible to the concatenation of a Rise-to-rag and a Rags-to-rise tales! Clearly nothing new there.
178.
by acbart 8y ago
I suppose you're thinking of these riots [1] after cheating was forbidden in university entrance exams in one Chinese locale? [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/101323...
179.
by acbart 8y ago
I've had a few friends express interest in pivoting their domain knowledge + small programming knowledge into a Data Science job. Are there many success stories or guides out there for those who make such a transition? I went the forma
180.
by acbart 8y ago
I do a lot of work with Skulpt, which included adding (somewhat superficial) support for MatPlotLib. You can make line plots, scatter plots, and histograms. It's a pretty cool system, though I will say developing in it isn't alway

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