Instead of deciding between Python or Lisp for a programming intro course...What about an intro course that uses *BOTH*? Good idea?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2015-05-11, Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro at gmail.com> wrote:

> Don't CS departments still have a computer languages survey class? When I
> was a graduate student at Iowa in the early 80s, we had one. (It was, as I
> recall, an upper level undergrad course. I didn't get into CS until
> graduate school, so went back to filled in some missing stuff.) I don't
> recall all the languages we touched on, but ISTR there were five or six. I
> know we hit Lisp (today, it would likely be Scheme), and probably APL
> (today it would probably be Python+Pandas, MATLAB, R, or something similar).

There was a similar class at both Iowa State and University of MN. You
learned a half-dozen languages in a single quarter.  IIRC, at ISU we
did Lisp, Prolog, APL, Snobol and a couple others.  The main
pedagogical language at the time was Pascal, but we also learned
FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, and a couple three assembly languages (PDP-11,
VAX, Z80, 6502).  If you were a computer enineering major instead of
computer science, you also leared a hardware description language.  At
the time it was AHPL.

More recent gruaduates only seem to know one language (Java or C++)
and are completely baffled by anything else.

And don't get me started on that damned noise they call music...

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