[Edu-sig] A case against GUIs in intro CS :-)

[Scott David Daniels]

Arthur wrote:
> The author communicates respect for his audience.  He says things once.
> Even hard things.  It doesn't mean he expects me to get it on reading it
> once, but we understand each other I think - there is nothing stopping me
> from reading it five or six times if I need to.  Him repeating himself is
> not going to help - because he has already said it the best way he could
> find to say it.  Saying it a second time, he could only be saying it a
> second best way.

Some day when you are feeling ambitious, take a gander at Knuth's "The
Art of Computer Programming."  Reading Knuth is hard; he writes well but
succinctly.  A twenty-page assignment is a huge chunk of text.  But none
of is wrong, or hand-holding, or repetitious.  The one thing you might
not expect is that the answers to exercises sections includes ideas only
mentioned in that section.  I think of reading TAOCP as reading poetry;
you read a bit, reflect a lot, and then read a bit more.

--Scott David Daniels
Scott.Daniels at Acm.Org