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?"

Comments

Re:Functional

[El Cabri]

There are no two things more opposite to each other than OOP and functional programming. Functional programming is about FUNCTIONS, which are those that return a value that is completely determined by their arguments, not depending on, or modifying, any state. OOP is all about calling METHODS, which have values that are determined by both the arguments and the state of the object they're called on, and often are meant to modify that state.

Learn at least two paradigms WELL

[_greg]

I recommend learning at least two languages representing significantly different paradigms during a programmer's formative period. In this instance I consider C, C++, Java, C# and the lot to be in the same paradigm - procedural.

Haskell is a good language for exploring the functional paradigm. Smalltalk is good for object oriented. There are many good Prologs for learning logic relational programming. I recommend that a new programmer avoid multiparadigm languages until they have seriously explored programming in a more pure way in two or more paradigms.

I used to recommend SICP, now I recommend CTM.

Also important is to (1) enjoy the programming you are doing and (2) work on programs which do interesting things and get you feedback from others.

Re:All of them.

[i.of.the.storm]

That's similar to what my first college CS course has been like. We used SICP and it was a really interesting semester. We did functional, OO, client/server, and logic programming (or well those were the 4 paradigms that the prof considered the main ones) and it was pretty interesting. Since most people came in with OO experience only, doing functional programming through people for a loop at first. Of course, we did it all in Scheme, which is a cool language, too.

Re:The Basics.

[smallfries]

It sounds like you've missed the point. Not all languages operate on statements, with variables and assignment. These are common to imperative languages, which all fall under a single paradigm. The submitter asked which paradigm would be best to introduce someone to programming.

Your lack of experience in other paradigms (not meant as a slight, 99% of all mainstream work is done in imperative languages) means that you have a similar educational history to what the submitter is considering. You consider imperative languages to be the whole world, rather than just a subset of it.

Logic, or functional languages are very different. Learning them forces you to consider other approaches to programming than those that are evident in an imperative language. Making someone learn a functional language first can teach them a lot about programming in general. Especially when they move over to an imperative language, but they have a different bag of tricks to apply to problems.

One of the first languages that I learnt as a child was Logo. It's a bit of style these days, although it was fairly common back on 8-bit home computers. At the time I though of it as a bit weird in comparison to the other languages that I used, but it taught me to think about programming in a different way. It is only with the hindsight of 20 years and a degree that I can see that "weirdness" was because it was functional.