

Scheme:  Good or Bad for Freshman CS? - dstorrs
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9w1br/scheme_for_first_year_cs_classes_good_or_bad/
A new CS student states his opinion on why Scheme is a poor choice for intro CS.  More interesting because of the attitude that comes across clearly: that "working" code is all that matters, not testing, commenting, or other maintainability elements.  Hopefully his program will explicitly address this issue.
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dstorrs
A new CS student states his opinion on why Scheme is a poor choice for intro
CS. More interesting because of the attitude that comes across clearly: that
"working" code is all that matters, not testing, commenting, or other
maintainability elements. Hopefully his curriculum will explicitly address
this issue.

~~~
jacquesm
The interesting thing here is that his attitude is quite representative of
what I've seen in plenty of companies.

Code that 'works' is treated as though it is holy because hardly anybody is
around that worked on it originally and touching it is inviting disaster,
because the comments are non-existent.

In the 80s there were plenty of companies that made a substantial living out
of selling system development courses, where you were taught how to do it
'properly'.

This led to 12 lines of comments for every line of code, 100's of file folders
full of ascii art that never were looked at.

The pendulum for some reason never seems to stop in the middle.

------
protomyth
If you want your education to be about only what you will use at a job, then
go get a degree from a technical college that has a programming degree. If
want to learn computer science, which truthfully is more a math degree than an
engineering degree, learn to love new things.

------
protomyth
Maybe I'm just in a bad mood tonight, but I really envy the fact that this
"student" is learning scheme. My college used Modula-2 on an IBM 370 for all
the mainline classes.

~~~
gord
Yep.. my university covered things like data structures and complexity well
enough, but felt they had to dumb things down for freshmans, many of who would
not be advancing.

So we had java and pascal for various first year courses... I wish they had
just gone straight to Scheme - it would have been mind-altering and a lot of
fun.

They did have one course which was heavily project based which is the one I
remember clearly - write a toy compiler, add a feature to a minix like OS,
spellchecker with compressed dictionary etc.

