[mmirate]

> Messing around with a super abstracted language will give [the 6 year olds] the only thing they should get out of the lesson: you tell a computer what to do and it does it.

What is the point of that lesson at that age, then? As far as I can tell, it will be of no consequence to them until high school.

> I don't think we should be starting out with even mentioning binary to college students in the intro class ... How are [the college students] going to use that knowledge?

Ideally, CS would be taught in a "bottom-up" fashion, from transistors to gates to adders to processors to higher- and higher-abstracted concepts; with Haskell etc occurring last, or nearly so. Then we'd actually have a much more solid grasp of what's going on "under the hood" and can make more informed decisions (e.g. for iterating quickly through many structs, better to actually have 1 struct of arrays/B-trees than 1 array/B-tree of the many structs; both of which are better than anything that involves a linked list; all due to how processor caches work).

In such a situation, binary would indeed be important for assembly and arithmetic units; but also for e.g. knowing to replace expensive integer divisions with cheaper right-shifts when possible by making the divisor be a power-of-2.

[jackhack]

I make this same argument for today's Code Schools. They teach high-level language/frameworks like Ruby on Rails, and the graduates can do productive work, but often have no idea what's happening underneath. Take serialization for instance -- with a limited understanding, the DOM just somehow magically stores data and retrieves it later; but the operator has no understanding of a database, or knowledge of SQL, or a sense of the value of referential integrity, or foreign key indexes, or how to use explain plan to see where the time is going, etc. So when it comes time to tune/refactor/redesign for performance, the student is lost and goes off looking for some Gem to drop in and solve the problem.

Perhaps it's just a natural stratification of the industry, but it leaves me feeling uncomfortable and frustrated when a jr engineer doesn't understand what's happening underneath the veneer of Rails (not to pick on Rails solely, this could also apply with many other frameworks & languages - I just see this the most because it's the latest fad) and/or doesn't understand why reentrancy, interrupts, or parallelism with mutable items is dangerous and hard-as-hell to get right.

I would love to see more developers with at least a passing familiarity with the basic concepts of computing, of the sort presented in Chuck Petzold's book CODE (which I highly recommend).

[just read my post - I really am sounding like a grumpy old man these days, but I'm clicking "reply" anyway. Stay off my lawn. ;)]

[mmirate]

Exactly!

(Of course, being an undergraduate CS student, from my point of view the idea is better expressed as, "I would love to see more companies who value internship candidates with more familiarity with the basic concepts of computing, of the sort ... ".)