From: Christian Neukirchen Date: 2005-11-24T02:51:50+09:00 Subject: Re: teaching ruby as cs intro? Christophe Grandsire writes: > 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 :) . Just wanted to throw that in: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/Presentations/FDPE2005.html Ruby would make a great second language there, I think. > Christophe Grandsire. -- Christian Neukirchen http://chneukirchen.org