CS instruction is a mixed bag. I started out in CS in it's Middle Ages so my own initial experiences aren't relevant. As a graduate student for many years though, I have watched and taught new CS students, which has given me a perspective on learning CS. More importantly, I've had an opportunity to observe my own daughter who started programming in college, got a degree in CS and will soon be finishing grad school.
Observing how my daughter and her friends at other colleges were taught, I saw many unnecessary difficulties (Eclipse being one of them) and on the other hand some outstanding approaches to teaching them CS.
Her first language was Racket (interesting) and her first book was How to Design Programs, 2nd Ed. (excellent choice, see [1]). This course taught her basic principles and heuristics for designing programs. She was able to go back to these ideas when she was uncertain how to proceed and though the steps elucidated in the text was able to work through her assignments; by the end of the semester she wrote a simple video game going above and beyond the assignments requirements. Essential to making this course accessible to someone who had never programmed before college was the controlled environment provided by Racket. I believe that she did all of her programming within the IDE provided by installing Racket. For an absolute beginner, a controlled environment hiding the complexities of the file system, etc. worked very well. She wasn't sure if she was going to like CS, but this experience helped her decide to keep going. Thumbs up for Racket and How to Design Programs.
A couple of semesters later, she had to take the Data Structures course. Inexplicably to me, the course which covered subjects like single and doubly linked lists, hash tables, and binary trees used Java and Eclipse. I feel like this is just teaching bad habits. If you are using Java, why aren't you learning to use Java's own collection libraries. Why use a garbage collected language, without an explicit random addressable memory visible to the new programmer, in order to teach how one builds doubly linked lists? The book was terrible. Thumbs down on Java and Eclipse for teaching Data Structures.
So, I agree with the essay that learning the details of Java in an intro course is inappropriate. The Racket course provided a series of increasingly more comprehensive subsets of the language as the semester advanced, perfect for insulating the students from incidental complexity.
And, I also agree with Nora.codes that learning the details matter. Java was too high level, to full of other stuff (like type erasure) to get in the way and it really obscured the ideas behind pointers, and implementing one's own binary trees.
CS instruction is a mixed bag. I started out in CS in it's Middle Ages so my own initial experiences aren't relevant. As a graduate student for many years though, I have watched and taught new CS students, which has given me a perspective on learning CS. More importantly, I've had an opportunity to observe my own daughter who started programming in college, got a degree in CS and will soon be finishing grad school.
Observing how my daughter and her friends at other colleges were taught, I saw many unnecessary difficulties (Eclipse being one of them) and on the other hand some outstanding approaches to teaching them CS.
Her first language was Racket (interesting) and her first book was How to Design Programs, 2nd Ed. (excellent choice, see [1]). This course taught her basic principles and heuristics for designing programs. She was able to go back to these ideas when she was uncertain how to proceed and though the steps elucidated in the text was able to work through her assignments; by the end of the semester she wrote a simple video game going above and beyond the assignments requirements. Essential to making this course accessible to someone who had never programmed before college was the controlled environment provided by Racket. I believe that she did all of her programming within the IDE provided by installing Racket. For an absolute beginner, a controlled environment hiding the complexities of the file system, etc. worked very well. She wasn't sure if she was going to like CS, but this experience helped her decide to keep going. Thumbs up for Racket and How to Design Programs.
A couple of semesters later, she had to take the Data Structures course. Inexplicably to me, the course which covered subjects like single and doubly linked lists, hash tables, and binary trees used Java and Eclipse. I feel like this is just teaching bad habits. If you are using Java, why aren't you learning to use Java's own collection libraries. Why use a garbage collected language, without an explicit random addressable memory visible to the new programmer, in order to teach how one builds doubly linked lists? The book was terrible. Thumbs down on Java and Eclipse for teaching Data Structures.
So, I agree with the essay that learning the details of Java in an intro course is inappropriate. The Racket course provided a series of increasingly more comprehensive subsets of the language as the semester advanced, perfect for insulating the students from incidental complexity.
And, I also agree with Nora.codes that learning the details matter. Java was too high level, to full of other stuff (like type erasure) to get in the way and it really obscured the ideas behind pointers, and implementing one's own binary trees.
[1] https://htdp.org/2019-02-24/index.html