From: Francis Cianfrocca <garbagecat10@...>
Date: 2006-06-12T20:17:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby for Highschoolers?

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Ed Borasky said: "I believe the goals are stated in the original post. The
first half of
the course, Programming I, is to teach programming concepts. The second
half, presumably by someone else, called Programming II, is in Java."

You rather missed my point, and the rest of your post goes on to show that
you implicitly answered my question in a particular way. (You're thinking
about how best to give early training to young people who intend to become
serious programmers, as has everyone else on this thread.) That's the
assumption I was questioning.

You're an old pro, Ed, and you have a lot of good insights on how to train
people who will be doing serious programming using the traditional
methodologies we all use every day. But CS pedagogy (at least at the
university level) has undergone at least two upheavals in the last dozen
years that I'm aware of. The Scheme revolution happened at places like MIT
and Stanford when people realized that of the two equivalent models for
understanding computation (Church-style and Turing-style), only the former
can be taught easily without a lot of distortion from the lanugages used. (I
have opinions about why that turns out to be true, but that's another
thread.) Several years after that, business leaders started complaining that
CS graduates had no real-world skills (only Scheme), and a lot of places
changed their programs to basically teach algorithm cookbooks in Java. (In
my opinion, equally useless, in fact worse, since these young people may
know how to write Java but they don't know how to think about computation.)

Now it's dawning on a lot of people that since programming itself may become
a relatively low-value economic activity (why is yet another thread but Ruby
ironically has something to do with it), some other kind of training may
need to supplement programming pedagogy. And that may be training in how
sophisticated information technology may be used to add value to business
processes and other environments. It would be forward-looking if nothing
else for high-schoolers to be exposed to some of this.

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