Re: Some exciting new trends in concurrency and software design

[Oliver Kleinke <oliver.kleinke@c-01a.de>]

Am Mon, 20 Jun 2011 16:40:36 +0200
schrieb Georg Bauhaus <rm.dash-bauhaus@futureapps.de>:

> Incidentally, regarding mathematical elegance, why and when do
> students still run away from CS?  As soon as they are overwhelmed with
> formality, including inscrutable mathematical elegance.  Is it because
> they aren't bright, or is it rather because they cannot get good
> explanations? Because their teachers simply presume "obvious" math
> skills and cannot and do not know what it is like to not have grown
> up with all prerequisite mathematics.  All day.

Talking to my class mates at university (mostly first to fourth term
students, most of them had had no programming experience) I rather get
the impression that OOP involves abstract constructs that are not
'compact' for a beginner. FP wouldn't do any better. IMO the
best approach would be to first begin with simple structured
programming and then go on with programming by extension,
modularization, etc. From my limited experience I tell Java, C/C++ and
the like are not a good choice for an introductory programming
language and are meant to fail. But all that is nothing really new..
(There were some papers on that topic ~15 years ago I think.)