Source: thenewstack.io
What Should Be a Student’s First Programming Language?
When students first begin to learn computer science — which programming language should they start with?
And two different colleagues had recently suggested it didn’t matter which language was taught first to CS students, which got him thinking.
Yet by 2014 Python was reportedly already the most popular language in introductory courses in America’s top-ranked computer science programs (including MIT and University of California, Berkeley), according to an article in Communications of the ACM.
One 2019 paper from a trio of University of Winston-Salem State University researchers for the ACM’s Computer Science Education group even argues that every computer science student should also be equipped with “foundational knowledge” in big data and cloud computing, “and to possess some hands-on experience in deploying and managing big data applications in the cloud.”
Failure to grasp programming readily almost certainly implies failure to progress in computer science,” their paper argues, noting the question of which language to teach first has thus “been fiercely debated since computer science teaching started in universities.”
And two different colleagues had recently suggested it didn’t matter which language was taught first to CS students, which got him thinking.
Yet by 2014 Python was reportedly already the most popular language in introductory courses in America’s top-ranked computer science programs (including MIT and University of California, Berkeley), according to an article in Communications of the ACM.
One 2019 paper from a trio of University of Winston-Salem State University researchers for the ACM’s Computer Science Education group even argues that every computer science student should also be equipped with “foundational knowledge” in big data and cloud computing, “and to possess some hands-on experience in deploying and managing big data applications in the cloud.”
Failure to grasp programming readily almost certainly implies failure to progress in computer science,” their paper argues, noting the question of which language to teach first has thus “been fiercely debated since computer science teaching started in universities.”
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