How Not to teach a computer language

Re:How Not to teach a computer language by amalcon on Sunday November 06, 2011 @09:13AM (#3202691)

Indeed. The school I attended had two disjoint (as in, nobody ever took both), non-required introductory "programming language" courses whose goal was to give the students a language in which to complete the assignments for the real CS.

Other courses would cause you to learn languages (for example, one would cause you to learn Scheme, one would cause you to learn Prolog) to demonstrate particular quirks of language design, but that's a means to an end. Most of them were things like "Algorithms", "Foundations of Computer Science", and "Introductory A.I."

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Re:How Not to teach a computer language by rufibarbatus on Sunday November 06, 2011 @09:51AM (#3202770)

I didn't study CS in university, but my friends who have often mention subjects named after languages and frameworks (remarkably, I remember hearing about a year-long course on COBOL "because most national banks have a backend writen in COBOL").

(To clarify: I'm talking about schools in São Paulo, Brazil. No names mentioned because I've no first-hand experience — maybe they do have better courses and my friends are the ones picking the language-and-framework–related subjects.)

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