Comments on: My First Programming Language(TM)

By: yesa

yesa — Fri, 05 Mar 2004 05:07:26 +0000

get more confused actually…

what i want to know is what would be the best Foundational Programming Language to use especially for those who were neophites.
Specifically, C against Visual Basic.

By: Pete DePasquale

Pete DePasquale — Thu, 02 Oct 2003 22:37:30 +0000

Wow, I made the list. Cool… I’m currently deciding what else to do with CS1 Sandbox, now that I’m done with the PhD. Being that I had to code against what I call a bastardized version of C/C++ that we used for instruction at VT (now taught in Java), I’d have to port the underlying language to support Java. Isn’t someone (Ian?) working on this for BlueJ? Thus, it’s moot for me to do it as well.

I’ve actually got other irons in the fire that I want to get to, so I’m not sure what else I really have the desire to do. On the list however is to get a version released to the web for playing with (that does not include the data collection support which is still currently part of the code base). Also, when I last run it under 1.4 (which we didn’t do during the experiment), the splash screen hung the app… so a few tweaks need to happen…

In other news…. Matt, how do you draw those nice graphics in your blogs? What program is that?

By: Brad

Brad — Tue, 30 Sep 2003 08:22:37 +0000

“Mr Whorf, get down from there, and take off that ridiculous suit, it’s the Sapir Whorf hypothesis, not the Super Whorf hypothesis”

By: Matthias Felleisen

Matthias Felleisen — Sat, 27 Sep 2003 20:00:06 +0000

For the record, while PLT may not have done “pedagogic
research” in the sense of departments of education to
construct DrScheme, we have certainly conducted a
number of feedback experiments. Indeed, if we hadn’t
we probably would have come up with the language
levels and many other innovations in this environment.
I believe you followed DrScheme for a while and you
must have noticed that the language levels changed.
These changes were the results of classroom and lab
observations based on the existing prototypes.

I believe that you misunderstand the magnitude of the
task if you ask for more or the complexity if you believe
theoretical research helps. Constructing DrScheme is a
huge undertaking. It takes years to explore this thing,
and nothing but an honest (!) feedback-experiment
cycle helps you get to the end.

By: Gary Lewandowski

Gary Lewandowski — Fri, 26 Sep 2003 12:52:55 +0000

Hey Matt, I’d be interested in your thoughts on the Kernel Language Approach advocated by Van Roy and Haridi? (http://www.mozart-oz.org) It seems like their language would satisfy your criticism of development in hand with research (i.e. I think they would at least claim the blue arrow is natural and not leaky). Could it be done at the first year level? (Their text is aimed at 2nd year level students.)

My other thought here is to wonder what impact a student’s background brings in, even if we build a wonderful non-leaky language. Many of my students have done some sort of programming and that will leak into this (Sapir-Whorf I suppose).

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 24 Sep 2003 14:36:49 +0000

I’ve always been unsatisfied with teaching Java, namely because of the Language A problems you bring up. Students have to memorize “public static void main(String[] args)” just to get any program to run, and that’s just the start. I think they need to understand logic and loops before they can even start to put objects together.

I’ve been thinking that there should be some toys that kids can play with to get them familiar with the concepts in computer science. There’s hints and such that I like to bring up, like “99 bottles of beer on a wall” or “Bingo” are loops, but there’s not really any Lego-ish toys that let kids create objects and then describe their interactions. Computer languages are so virtual; I’d like to have something concrete to play with and explore. Toys, my ideal CS1 language.