Date: 2010-07-29 08:11 pm (UTC)From: [personal profile] winterkoninkje
winterkoninkje: shadowcrane (clean) (Default)
Yeah, you get that too. That's part of the reason I don't tend to bring up how long I've been programming for, let alone how long I've been doing type theory/category theory.

I bring up beginning with Perl more often because I think that's actually relevant. I started from Perl and have been working my way down towards the CPU (and pure theory) ever since. I think starting with a high-level language like Perl is best, because it encourages you to think with high-level abstractions instead of getting hung up on low-level implementation details. All the folks in my undergrad classes who started with C (or C++ or Java) had a much harder time grasping the algorithms at stake because they couldn't see the forest for the trees. If I were designing intro curricula, I'd be torn between teaching Perl vs teaching Haskell. The pure/strong-typing and lambda-calculus of Haskell are really important to learn early, but Haskell tends to have a lot of low-level datastructures which can distract from the basics. Perl is great for writing how you think and ignoring low-level details and paradigms, but it's also an untyped nightmare. C et al. are the worst of both worlds (low-level and no types worth mentioning), whereas untyped functional languages like Erlang and Scheme lay somewhere in between (lambda calculi, but still no types).
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