[namibj]

I'll refer to the talk [0] from last congress about the german sibling of the high-school version of MIT's How to Design Programms [1]. It's about teaching a functional-first style of abstraction with a _very_ rigorous structured approach to writing the design. I wish I'd started with HtDP instead of Pascal/Delphi (later Java), but it's the best approach I see if one wants to quickly be able to start a project of non-trivial complexity without it ending in a horror show of technical debt and/or frustrating bugs one doesn't even know how to analyze/tackle. If a slightly above average (1-2 sigma IQ, aka 120+-10) 6th grader isn't scared of the complexity, it should be possible to rely on the urge of curiosity to get said child to continue being teached by oneself. While I applaud the use of Racket for this teaching, it unfortunately scares off many who believe that companies prefer code-monkeys who can hack stuff together within Python's ecosystem. I know that, with some connections, it's easy to start with these functional skills in a company that has tasks that are suited for this approach, as well as senior engineers with some functional skills (enough to grasp what the new hire created). A good manager can let someone with no industry experience work on a well-defined component that takes 1~3 weeks to design and implement, with next to no micro-management. It only works though if the new hire is skilled in designing software, which HtDP has as it's main goal (it's even in the title). I'd hire a newbie self-taught with HtDP after testing stochastically to verify that he/she actually worked and understood all of it with just one 1~4 day in-office real-world task to test if the learned things compose into actual wholesome software design skills. I'd not like one who learned Python on his/her own and now has 1.5 years full-time experience designing&coding Python. Not without some specific testing to judge the quality of their design skills, which btw. is a far harder test than randomly sampling concepts of HtDP with short excercises similar to those in the book itself, followed by the mentioned few-day practice test. HtDP gives me the confidence to assume these few-day results scale to projects that take months, after just about .5~1 year of experience with projects that take a few days to weeks each.

[0] https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9800-how_to_teach_programming_to... [1] https://htdp.org