From: Christophe Grandsire Date: 2005-11-23T21:50:32+09:00 Subject: Re: teaching ruby as cs intro? Selon Mike Schwab : > My school teaches intro to programming with Java or C#, intro to cs > with Scheme, then requires two semesters of C to scare us into being > good and careful. Learning about Ruby has been a way nicer > experience and I think it would draw more kids into the major if it > was taught early on. What do you think? > I completely agree. It would also be good to teach it early because it introduces concepts that are wrongly considered high-level in a familiar setting. I'm talking about closures, iterators, continuations, etc... Most of those concepts are usually taught only much later on, while the students have got used to languages that don't have them. The result is that they get to be considered as arcane and complicated features one should use only when one cannot do things in a classical way, while they are actually pretty simple and powerful concepts (closures in particular are very intuitive) which just suffer from bad press. It would be good that students get to learn those concepts quickly, as they seem to be getting more and more common, and they will need to understand them. And Ruby, with its non-intrusive syntax, is the best candidate for teaching them. Just my 2 eurocents anyway :) . -- Christophe Grandsire. http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr It takes a straight mind to create a twisted conlang.