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I know Shriram very well, he and Kathi do excellent work and as I said they are focused on more valuable projects than trying to prove one language is superior to another for CS1. They are building tools and curricula, and have done some research that sheds some light on the tradeoffs in using certain languages like Racket. Kathi's "Rainfall Accumulates" paper is one of the few papers that gets close to work in the space I am talking about. Shriram's analyses often leave me stunned at just how sharp that guy is, and helps remind me that CS Ed really needs to level up its game. That said, the HtDP curriculum that they were involved in, and led to Bootstrap and a host of their other projects, was not grounded in any kind of data collection or treated as an empirical research project. Smart people with good intentions built something and threw it into a classroom. Intentionally so, by design [1]. Their subsequent work with Pyret is much better grounded and well-informed, and I've been absolutely fascinated by it. Their data science curriculum delights me, and I have often thought that if I had more time I'd translate it to Python. I think their more recent proposal about a Table Abstract Data Type is just inspired. But we are still VERY far from ever proving things like, "Racket is easier for students to learn". I'm fairly sure it's not even worth doing. I appreciate the original article was just one student's perspective. It's a perspective I don't entirely disagree with. Nonetheless, they make interesting claims not backed by any kind of published, empirical data. They hypothesize that Racket is virtuous to learn because of how it presents recursion, and because of its simplistic syntax. Cool theory, but not proven using Randomized Controlled Studies. I mean, most things in CS Ed aren't, so I don't think it's a surprising thing to point out. But that doesn't mean we should just sit back and accept these claims. Personally, I have seen the HtDP curriculum do damage. I have also seen it firsthand do a lot of good. My Racket relationship is complicated [2]. The author makes a great point of the potential value of these models, and also mentions how this whole debate is sort of pointless. I believe that at the end of the day, the CS1 language is simultaneously very important and yet somehow unimportant - it's all just the psychology of the people involved. That, too, is an unsubstantiated claim. But please, tell me more about how I have not done my due diligence. Would you like to cite some actual RCT papers that back up the claims founding all this stuff? Or do you want to keep citing textbooks like that somehow proves something? [1] https://felleisen.org/matthias/Thoughts/Measuring_education....
[2] https://github.com/acbart/myracketrelationshipiscomplicated.... |