On Mon, Sep 13, 2004 at 12:04:21PM -0500, John T. Hoffoss wrote: > Interestingly enough, the Programming for Scientists & Engineers > course uses C++, rather than Java. This forces non-computer science > students to get into exactly what I would avoid teaching even computer > science students, immediately. I was a Teaching Assistant for this > course for a semester, and I'll tell ya, some of those kids would have > been great programmers had they learned to program before they had to > learn pointers, references, and memory management. Others would have > still sucked had we used Java, but it would've been easier to teach > them. IMO, Perl or Python would have been much better suited to these > kids...of course, I don't teach or design curriculum anywhere. I agree that C++ is not an ideal first programming language from some stand points, bt it is a decent compromise. Science and engineering deparments want their students to a learn a language that is actually used in industry. Most large engineering and science codes (simulations, etc.) are written in Fortran or C/C++, so the departments want their students to learn those languages. Many CS departments don't want to teach Fortran, even though it is a much better intro language in a lot of ways. Pointers and memory management issues do exist in F90/F95 but they are advanced topics that can ignored at the beginning (unlike C/C++ where they are central issues). But CS departments would rather teach C++, so that's the usual compromise. I would agree that there would be some advantages to teaching Perl or Python to science and engineering majors. Those languages are nice for doing homework problems, etc. since you don't have to futz with compilers and there are nice plotting libraries easily available. Of course for problems at this level Mathematica/Matlab/IDL are all viable alternatives as well. I don't think Java makes any sense for this class, though. Very little science is done with Java, and it doesn't have the advantage of simplicity like Python. -- Jim Crumley |Twin Cities Linux Users Group Mailing List (TCLUG) crumley at fields.space.umn.edu |Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Ruthless Debian Zealot |http://www.mn-linux.org/ Never laugh at live dragons |Dmitry's free,Jon's next? http://faircopyright.org _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list