Language I Should Ponder [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

I got lost in Paul Graham's website (I made the mistake of clicking on the "articles" button and finding way too much interesting stuff there), and after reading more articles than I meant to this afternoon, a couple of thoughts have hit me:

Damn, this guy has a knack for phrasing things in ways that invite quotation; and
What would happen if a university started teaching Lisp as the first language in its CS curriculum -- if "introduction to programming" used Lisp? If the Algol family (by which I mostly mean Pascal/C/C++/Java) and the ForTran family had to wait until second year (or at least second semester)?

(I do know Lisp but not very well. I learned enough of it to help the-ex-girlfriend-I'm-not-supposed-to-admit-I-know pass a class in it, toyed with it briefly 'cause it looked cool, and set it down without having really done anything with it. Maybe after I catch up on all the more urgent stuff on my to-do list, it'll be time to download a Lisp interpreter.)

Not feeling great tonight. I plan to make it to 3LF rehearsal tonight, but will probably show up late.

January

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
1 1	2 1	3 1	4 1	5 1	6 1	7 1
8 1	9 1	10 1	11 1	12 1	13 1	14 1
15 1	16 1	17 1	18 1	19 1	20 1	21 1
22 1	23 1	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31

Sun

Mon

Tue

Wed

Thu

Fri

Sat

i haven't followed the link so i don't know if he already covered this, but at MIT, 6.001 the intro programming class is taught in scheme, which is a variant of lisp. only programming language i've ever learned. (which is not to say i remember any of it now :/

[link] [reply]

Ah, an "easy answer": someone's already done/doing the experiment, so all I have to do is pay close attention to the programmers who've come out of MIT. (And, uh, anyone scared off from becoming a programmer because of that course, too, I guess.)

Graham does eventually mention 6.001 in passing, in "Being Popular" (http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html), but it's a passing reference without much context: "[the hackers] who took 6.001 and understood it". I wouldn't have known that was intro-programming, being unfamiliar with MIT's numbering scheme, if I hadn't seen your comment first.

[link] [parent] [reply]

of course, the confounding factor here is that many, possibly most, of the people who come to MIT to do course 6 are the sort who have been programming since they were 8, so while 6.001 (pronounced "six double-oh-one" and frequently referred to as just "double-oh-one") may be their first college programming experience, it's probably not the first programming language they've been exposed to.

The language for my intro CS course in college was APL, a language designed with the idea "let's make a huge number of things one-character operators, even if we have to make up new characters and have special terminals and keyboards that include them." It was great for that "initiation into the temple" feeling of learning ways of thinking that are different from those of ordinary mortals, but if I hadn't already studied procedural languages beforehand, I might have been warped for life. :-)

I'm all for exposing students to different ways of doing things (languages, user interfaces, everything), so they don't get stuck with the idea that everything has to be like the most popular, but on the other hand, I've never really understood the Cult of Lisp. (I used Lisp for at least a couple of classes, and occasional Emacs-hacking.)

Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Language I Should Ponder

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

Intro languages

Links

January