[craigsmansion]

> It’s like teaching someone grammar by forcing them to use Esperanto

Or Latin, which for the longest time wasn't called "Latin", but simply something that was taught in "grammar school", because it addresses the underlying fundamentals quite clearly without getting bogged down with semantics. Latin is still used for that, btw, but only in "top schools".

>Teach students using languages with the absolute minimal friction

Say, something with a trivial syntax; something that is easy to express any construct in without too many preconceptions of what a programming language should look like.

If only there was a language like that!

[seibelj]

You have an ivory tower elite mindset. My mindset is to actually help students learn and get excited without being scared on day 1.

Save whatever functional nonsense you want to teach for “Obscure Languages 401” class. CS101 should be getting people into programming and teaching them using languages that they can actually do stuff with. If you teach someone python they can do statistical analysis and have a huge number of libraries to start making fun projects with. Teach them Scheme and they switch to the school of communications.

[craigsmansion]

> Save whatever functional nonsense you want to teach for “Obscure Languages 401” class.

Do you also talk to your students like that when, say, one of them mentions an interest in different languages or mentions anything that doesn't agree with your "mindset"?

> using languages that they can actually do stuff with

Didn't you just state: "The fundamentals of programming exist in all languages." ?

I was only commenting on your "minimal friction" that scheme naturally provides and how elegantly fundamentals can be demonstrated by it (right up to and including meta-circular evaluators).

[geofft]

If your argument is that teaching Scheme is as good an idea as teaching Latin, I think there will be no disagreement....