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

[Rustom Mody]

On Monday, May 11, 2015 at 8:05:56 PM UTC+5:30, Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2015-05-11, Skip Montanaro  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.

These survey of PLs courses are a travesty.
At best students learn nothing
At worst they imagine they learnt something.
IMHO if you dont get some feel for the language, something about its 'zen',
you should not be allowed to say you know anything about it.
Getting a grade for it ensures the exact opposite.

[I recently heard of a course whose exam papers had questions like:
"Name 7 keywords in C++
]