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From: paradis@encore.UUCP (Jim Paradis)
Newsgroups: soc.college,comp.edu
Subject: Re: First Language Taught in CSC degree track
Message-ID: <1764@encore.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 19-Jul-87 18:35:37 EDT
Article-I.D.: encore.1764
Posted: Sun Jul 19 18:35:37 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 20-Jul-87 00:41:34 EDT
References: <1472@super.upenn.edu.upenn.edu>
Reply-To: paradis@encore.UUCP (Jim Paradis)
Organization: Encore Computer Corp., Marlboro, MA
Lines: 26
Xref: mnetor soc.college:771 comp.edu:510

In article <1472@super.upenn.edu.upenn.edu> Earl Shaffer writes:
>Which language should be taught first in the Computer Science
>track for incoming freshman?
>
>Remember, this is the course that will teach all the bad habits we
>learned from our first language(s)! (happy face)  For example, I
>still use "I" for counters because I learned Fortran first. (yech!)

Believe it or not, at MIT they teach Lisp in their intro-CS course!
(6.001 for you techies out there).  When I was a froshling they used
a strange dialect called Ulisp that ran on a DEC-20.  By the time I
left they were using Scheme on HP micros, and I think they'll be doing
that for a while.  Anyway, one of the reasons that they did this was
because a LOT of MIT CS majors already had played with computers before
coming to MIT, and so were chock-full of bad habits from their various
"first languages".  By using a language unlike anything most anyone
had seen before, they hoped to be able to start on a cleaner slate.
Of course, that didn't prevent ME from speaking Lisp with a heavy Fortran
accent for a while... but I got over it eventually.

   +----------------+  Jim Paradis                  linus--+
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You don't honestly think ENCORE is responsible for this??!!