[puzzledobserver]

I think it depends on the audience.

For a group of prospective CS majors, or people learning programming for its own sake, I think it would be good to start with a high level language, say Python, Scheme or Ocaml, and then progressively deconstruct the layers of abstraction between the language and the physics.

For a group of electrical engineering majors, it might actually tie in better with their other courses if one starts with simple physical constructs like bits, bytes, and gates, and gradually introduce abstraction layers to form more convenient programming models.

[smallcharleston]

That’s basically how they taught my computer architecture course, but they started from C (instead of Python) and worked back to assembly and then to transistors or whatever those gate things are (I studied enough to make an A and don’t care anymore unless someone pays me to).

I think it must be a reasonably normal approach.