[TUHS] ratfor vibe

[Dan Cross]

On Tue, Feb 1, 2022 at 2:40 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> Dan - thanks.
>

Sure thing.

By the way: the thing I was thinking about earlier that was so biting
towards OOP was an earlier version of Harper's post, in which he writes,
"Object-oriented programming is eliminated entirely from the introductory
curriculum, because it is both anti-modular and anti-parallel by its very
nature, and hence unsuitable for a modern CS curriculum."
https://web.archive.org/web/20110321004746/https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/teaching-fp-to-freshmen/
(How's _that_ for an academic glove-slap?)

It would appear that language was softened to read "unsuitable for our
purposes" sometime in 2013, and then that rather inflammatory clause was
removed entirely by early March, 2015. I had read the original and felt
some schadenfreude.

        - Dan C.

On Tue, Feb 1, 2022 at 2:10 PM Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Feb 1, 2022 at 1:49 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>>
>>> [snip]
>>> FWIW:  Through the 60s, the early and into the later 70s, CMU used to
>>> call its 15-104 "Intro to Computer Programming" and was based on batch
>>> (card) computing using FTN4, later WATFIV.  They used a number of books.
>>> The book I had was from Waterloo and other than being blue and black in
>>> color, I remember little from it - since I already knew how and the TA let
>>> me take 'self-taught' by turning in assignments/taking the tests without
>>> going to class.  Like Freshman Physics and Calc, all intro science
>>> and engineering majors were required to take it however, since the
>>> engineering depts were sure what you would see when you graduated was FTN
>>> based code [which was probably true for the more pure Science types].
>>> Much later (many years after I left)  the CS Dept finally convinced Mat
>>> Sci, Chem E and Mech E to allow the course to be taught using Pascal.  I
>>> think they use either Java or Python now, but I haven't checked.
>>>
>>
>> There was a bit of a stir about 10 years ago when CMU switched from Java
>> (I think?) to Python and SML for introductory computer science education. I
>> remember reading a report at the time, which I _think_ is this:
>> http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/2010/CMU-CS-10-140.pdf
>>
>> Though perhaps not, because it _really_ bit into Java and the whole OOP
>> thing.
>>
>> Robert Harper had a blog post that I found interesting about exposing
>> freshmen to functional programming:
>> https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/teaching-fp-to-freshmen/
>>
>>         - Dan C.
>>
>>
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