Like to attend a lecture at this fall? Register at. The downside? Malan acknowledged that it might be harder to create engaging problem sets early on than it would be using a higher-level language like Python or Java. And in addition, C is also a relatively small language, so “by mid-semester, students have seen nearly all of it (except for, e.g., unions and function pointers).” “It’s a powerful thing, too, I think, to go from implementing a hash table (or trie) in C in one week, and then just a week or so later implement the same in just one line of PHP or JavaScript code,” he wrote.
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Malan, according to his Quora comments, believes that the weeks of C give students an opportunity to understand some of the fundamental building blocks of all programming languages (while also providing an opportunity to explain the crucial security concept of buffer overflows). If you want a hash table, you have to implement it yourself.” If you want something to be somewhere in memory, you have to put it there yourself. Malan, once wrote on Quora that “ C is just about as close to a computer’s hardware as you can get before you have assembly language, (which would be too arcane, I think, for an introductory course like CS50).
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The explainer continued, “The goal, ultimately, is for students to feel not that they ‘learned how to program in X’ but that they ‘learned how to program.’”īut why start them off with C? The class’s instructor, professor David J. “Rather than teach just one language, CS50 introduces students to a range of ‘procedural’ programming languages, each of which builds conceptually atop another,” explained the course’s official FAQ. In the first week, students actually write a program in Scratch, the block-based visual programming language developed to teach younger learned by MIT Media Lab, before switching over to C - and then switching again in later weeks to Python, and then JavaScript. Meanwhile, Harvard University’s own introductory course CS50 has for years stuck with a multilingual approach.
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Yet if you peek in on their syllabuses today, you’ll find CS106A now appears to be using Python (and the P圜harm IDE), while the CS106B syllabus indicates they’re using C++. But 15 years later, he’d told the student newspaper that “It’s 2017 now, and Java is showing its age.” Hailing JavaScript as “the language of the internet,” Roberts had helped switch the classes to Java back in 2002, writing textbooks and working with the other faculty to restructure the courses and assignments. Previously Stanford’s introductory classes had been based on the C programming language (and before that, Pascal). (So instead of CS106A, the course was named “CS106J.”) The change involved creating a new textbook and assignments, as well as training new teaching assistants, and Roberts himself came out of retirement to teach the class. Eric Roberts, a Stanford emeritus professor of computer science, had spent five years working on transitioning the course from Java to JavaScript, according to Stanford’s student newspaper, and he’d finally created a new JavaScript-based pilot version of the course. In 2017, Stanford University made headlines with some changes to its introductory computing course for computer science majors. Maybe it all gives us our first glimpse at the next generation of programmers - and some clues as to how we’re envisioning our future. But it’s also interesting to note the changes happening over the years, with computer science departments gradually evolving their choices for their students’ crucial first programming language. But that was back in the late 1960s when the curricula were first being established - while today, students of all ages and experience levels are learning how to program, and they ultimately have different needs.ĭifferent universities still have different answers for the question, reflecting both their teaching philosophies and their sense of which language will prove most important to their graduates in the wider tech industry.
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“I have a hypothesis that this belief once was true when the field was younger,” Guzdial wrote in a recently-published piece in Communications of the ACM, the house organ of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). And two different colleagues had recently suggested it didn’t matter which language was taught first to CS students, which got him thinking. One person who’s given it a lot of thought is Mark Guzdial, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan who has also conducted his own research in the fields of computer science education. When students first begin to learn computer science - which programming language should they start with? It’s a question that’s fascinated educators for decades.