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Best Paradigm For a First Programming Course?
Keyper7 writes "The first programming course I had during my computer science schooling, aptly named 'Introduction to Programming,' was given in C because its emphasis was on imperative programming. A little before I graduated, though, it was decided that the focus would change to object-oriented programming with Java. (I must emphasize that the change was not made because of any hype about Java or to dumb down the course; back then and still, it's presented by good Java programmers who try to teach good practices and do not encourage excessive reliance on libraries.) But the practices taught are not paradigm-independent, and this sparked a discussion that continues to this day: which paradigm is most appropriate to introduce programming? Besides imperative and object-oriented, I know teachers who firmly believe that functional programming is the best choice. I'm interested in language-independent opinions that Slashdotters might have on this matter. Which paradigm is good to introduce programming while keeping a freshman's mind free enough for him/her to learn other paradigms afterwards?"
As a high school students, one of the most mind-numbingly annoying things about our school's programming courses is that they are taught to the lowest possible denominator... in Java. To the point at which we can complete an entire semester of assignments in the first week or two of the course.
If you're going to teach, teach. Some of your students are not complete idiots, and are capable of going in depth on data structures, basic algorithms, etc.. The other ones can spend a semester teaching themselves how to make a hello world program without understanding what's going on. Or fuck it and just fail them.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, some of us students aren't taking computer programming so we can blow it off and get a bullshit A. And courses that aren't doing it right turn us off to the entire field.