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I once got to be a fly on the wall (well, a member in the audience) to a graduate project presentation where a team had put together a simple game development environment to get young people excited about programming (Alice, which is still around: https://www.alice.org/). They were presenting their (relatively positive) results on how much engagement they'd seen getting students involved using Alice as opposed to available alternatives for learning beginner programming.

One of the professors in the School of Computer Science raised the question of why Java was chosen as the backing language for the whole project, since it's not a very strongly-typed language and for pedagogy, there are much better languages with more rigorous type safety.

The student presenting began to get a bit flustered when she answered (I believe her answer was something along the lines of familiarity of potential mentors and teachers with the language) and the professor seemed to reject her answer out of hand. Finally, her advisor stepped in and just dead-panned across the room "Because elementary-school students are excited about seeing cool things on screen, not about computing the Ackermann function." General murmurs of laughter all around.

I think those two professors had an ongoing debate behind the scenes that the unfortunate student had just gotten caught in the middle of.

(Fiction short story related to this topic: http://thecodelesscode.com/applicant/2)




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