checking if a list is empty

[Ian Kelly]

On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 1:41 PM, harrismh777 <harrismh777 at charter.net> wrote:
> On the other hand, kids today are dumped into a first comp sci course in
> programming and plopped in-front of a Hugs interactive shell and then are
> expected to learn programming and be successful by trying to grasp pure
> functional programming in Haskell(!) in a ten to 12 week term and we wonder
> why so many students are failing their 'first' programming class!!  Give me
> a break.  No, give them a break.

Well, at least Haskell is probably better as an introductory language
than Lisp or Scheme.  But what schools actually do this?  My
perception is that the vast majority of schools use C++ or C# or Java,
typically relegating functional programming to a single second- or
third-year course.  Of course it's well known that MIT used to use
Scheme, but they switched to Python a couple years ago.

> Guido van Rossum has said in one of his interviews (can't remember now which
> one) that BASIC is a terrible first computer language... and I agree... but,
> it was a lot better than Hugs!  But that's not my point, my point is that
> Python is better still.  Why?  Because Python can be taught at a *very*
> rudimentary level ( input, control, arithmetic, logic and output ) in almost
> a BASIC or REXX procedural style -- top down -- so that students 'get it'.
> Then, in subsequent classes down the road (much later) Python can grow and
> expand with the student's re-conditioning for more in-depth expansion of
> concepts and knowledge.

I don't think a single language is necessarily going to be best for
all students.  If a math major comes to you wanting to learn some
programming for theorem-proving, bearing in mind that they probably
aren't interested in learning more than a single language, would you
try to start them out with Python, or would you just give them the
functional language that they're ultimately going to want?