Re^3: Perl Advocacy w.r.t Teaching

Take something like a data structure course. Data structures are completely independent of language. A rather lot of CS offerings do their data structure course in Java. Why? Java is the last language I'd use for teaching data structures, because you'll be forced to view all your data through the eyes of an object. OO is not useful for learning data structures, and will likely get in the way. Not only is Java a not good language for this task, it's an outright bad one, since the point is to learn data structures, not Java's obtuse way of implementing data structures. C would be a much better (though still not perfect) language choice, and LISP is probably better still. Leave Java for a Java class, if you must.

If I'm going to take a Computer Science major, I actually want some Science (or rather, research). If it's going to be about making applications, then it should be called "Software Engineering" or somesuch. Something to make it clear that the goal is practical applications, not research and theory.

"There is no shame in being self-taught, only in not trying to learn in the first place." -- Atrus, Myst: The Book of D'ni.

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Re^4: Perl Advocacy w.r.t Teaching
by Anonymous Monk on Feb 10, 2005 at 17:59 UTC

I don't think it's relevant that Java uses objects, or that LISP uses lists. Or that C just scribbles all over your memory. Those are details. A balanced tree is still a balanced tree, regardless whether you implement your nodes or your keys as objects, lists, SVs or memory locations.

A teaching language should be simple, so you don't have to spend your time on syntax details. But whether the working horse of a language is objects or lists or something else is, IMO, not relevant.

BTW, the best language to explain algorithms and datastructures are drawings.

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