Which first-course languages? (was: What schools use Eiffel (was

[geert@dialis.xs4all.nl (Geert Bosch)]

dennison@escmail.orl.mmc.com wrote in a message to All:

>  In the programming languages class, it used Ada, Eiffel, and Miranda.

 de> Miranda????
The university I'm student of (University of Twente, The Netherlands) also
teaches Miranda as first-course language. Miranda is a functional programming
language, ie. a language without an assignment statement.

There are advantages of Miranda over Pascal, when teaching in a first-year
course. One of the biggest, IMHO, is that (unlike Pascal and C/C++) nobody
knows the language already, when they start studying CS. When I was in my
first year, we still learned Pascal, and the differences between people that
had never programmed a computer before, and people who had written thousands
of lines of Pascal code was huge.

The students already knowing Pascal (I was one of them) found the course to
be to easy, even boring sometimes, and people who didn't know anything about
programming languages already couldn't catch up. It also turned out that the
people who already had programming experience often came into trouble later
on, when courses became harder and when they didn't have an advantage
compared to other students.

Since our first year is also meant as a selection mechanism, to filter out
bad students quickly, Miranda is a much better language to teach in the first
year as Pascal, C or something similar to these.

Because Miranda is not a procedural language but a functional language, good
knowledge of mathematics is much more important. The gap between presenting
an algorithm and proving it's right al also much smaller. It turns out that
single-minded students who think they already know everything about
programming because they've been hacking too long, often have huge problems
mastering Miranda, because they try to learn it as a procedural language, and
because their mathematic skills aren't on the same level as their hacking
skills. Many of the hackers don't understand the fact that it's possible to
pass a list of all odd integers as a parameter to a function, for example.
You can tell them about lazy evaluation which whill only actually compute the
odd integers which are needed for output but they find that scary and try to
avoid it. 

It's good to see that bright students with a good understanding of
mathematics but don't have any programming experience at all, often leave the
'hackers' in the dust, when the first excercises have to be made. The first
group starts writing some rough outline on paper, and the second group runs
to the computer immediately.



Groetjes, Geert