On Thu, 27 Oct 2011 08:56:10 -0400 SK <seth235 at yahoo.com> writes:
> Ravi wrote:
> > I recall watching undergrads, especially non-CS majors, wilting
> upon encountering Lisp (or having it forced on them), after their
> initial excitement with what they could do in a few lines of C (Perl
> wasn’t popular back then).
>
> yes. I used to help teach the freshman CS programming course at
> Penn
> (mixture of students, but mostly
> those intending to major in CS). There were many students who were
> very comfortable programming in
> C, who had to really readjust their way of thinking for Scheme or
> ML, two
> of the languages we taught. (Such readjustment was exactly the
> intent, of
> course.) What was so interesting to me that was that some of these
> students had gone to the "best" high schools,
> and learned a lot, but had never been introduced to basic concepts
> of
> recursion. Of course,
> some percentage of them had the reaction, "this is really cool!".
> As
> it is. After all
> these years, I still say that to myself when I write recursive code
> going down a tree.
>
> I really wish some of this stuff was taught earlier. There's no
> reason for students not to have
> seen The Towers of Hanoi problem in high school, or earlier.
I recall being first exposed to the Towers of Hanoi problem back in high school in a computer lab class in the early 1970s.
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant www.foxymath.com Learn or Review Basic Math
>
> Seth
>
> ___________________________________
>
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