[Discuss] Functional programming @ UVic (was 'C' string tokenizer for those who hate strtok)

[dbarker at turing.cs.camosun.bc.ca]

Thus spake stephen hawkes (sghawkes at shaw.ca):
...
> So why not pascal or something for a first language? C is no good 
> because of the memory management stuff (bit to much for that course 
> imho), but if you were to argue that it isn't too much then C++ would be 
> a good candidate, as you could start with procedural/imperative then 
> using the same language move to OO. Don't most other universities
> use c++?

Actually I think C++ would be a far worse choice than C. The syntax
has become more complex with the recent versions, so that hello world
now has to have either

	using namespace std;

or 

	std:cout << "hello world!" << std:end;

I have had to teach C++ as a first language (to engineers) a couple of
times recently and IMHO it is a simply awful language for teaching.

> 
> As much as I love perl, I really think it would make a horrible first 
> language (imagine the mess students would make with that). How about 
> python though? I think I remember Corless stating that he thought it was 
> a good language for teaching.

This last year we made python our first programming language at
camosun. It is sufficiently close to pseudocode that when I translate
the algorithms from the text we used to use for the Into to Computer
Science course into python and showed them to other faculty most
didn't see any difference until it was pointed out to them.

Although  a single iteration (recursion?) of the course is hardly
statistically significant, my feeling, both during and after teaching
it, was that we are definitely on the right lines. Most of the
students enjoyed it too - which is more than can be said for java,
when that was our first language.

(I was, however, somewhat embarrassed to discover somewhere else which
has been using python since 1999: Alberni High School...)

-- 
|Deryk Barker, Computer Science Dept. | Music does not have to be understood|
|Camosun College, Victoria, BC, Canada| It has to be listened to.           |
|email: dbarker at camosun.bc.ca         |                                     |
|phone: +1 250 370 4452               |         Hermann Scherchen.          |