Communications - April 2012

The tsunami of structured scientific data produced by a new generation of sensors and the growth of semi-structured and unstructured data from business, entertainment, social networks, and popular culture have created new needs for the creative application of our intellectual amplifier. As the performance of IBM’s Watson system on the game show “Jeopardy!” illustrated, the combination of large-scale data, rich algorithm suites, and powerful computing are opening new vistas. Vannevar Bush’s 1940s vision of a Memex, a device capable of storing, indexing, and retrieving data from a broad knowledge base, is now within our reach.

It really is about how we use computing as an intellectual amplifier, allowing humans to be more productive and more creative by doing what we do best—asking interesting questions, ones that span multiple disciplines and that illuminate opportunities at their interstices—aided by powerful analytic and computation engines.

mark Guzdial “from ‘must’ and ‘unsuitable’ to Design Guidelines in computing education” http://cacm.acm.org/

blogs/blog-cacm/106838 march 25, 2011

Matthias Felleisen gave a rousing opening keynote at SIGCSE 2011. There was a lot to like about the ideas and insights he presented. I particularly liked the design-oriented topic list for an introductory CS course, versus a language-oriented one. The latter one looks like just about any intro course you’ve ever seen, which makes his point. What I didn’t like about his talk was the tone of the rhetoric. “Lesson 1: Your PL/IDE must support an arithmetic of images.” “Must”? I loved what they are doing with images in Racket, but there are other tools for novices that do lead to success but don’t support an arithmetic of images. A useful design guideline might be: “Lesson 1: A PL/IDE that supports an arithmetic of image engages and motivates students.” I buy that. I also buy that there are lots of ways to engage and motivate students without an arithmetic of images.

Recently, I visited Carnegie Mellon University where I heard about their

maRK GuzDial
“let’s celebrate
our successes in
computing education
without claiming
that ours is the only
path to that success.”

new introductory curriculum. They introduce computing with an imperative first course using a language called c-0 (“C-nought”), then follow that with a second course using functional programming ML. The courses are quite rigorous in that they place a strong emphasis on verification and proof as part of program development. I love the multilingual, multiparadigmatic model! Object-oriented methods show up in a new course, not part of the core curriculum. Then someone sent me a link to Robert Harper’s Existential Type blog, where he claims in the “Teaching FP to freshman” post, “Object-oriented programming is eliminated entirely from the introductory curriculum, because it is both anti-modular and antiparallel by its very nature, and hence unsuitable for a modern CS curriculum.” Really? “Unsuitable?” The CMU report, Introductory Computer Science Education at Carnegie Mellon University: A Deans’ Perspective, describing the rationale for the new approach is more careful in its claims:

Although object-oriented programming (in its myriad forms) remains a dominant theme in industrial software development, the use of object-oriented languages, such as Java, at the introductory level introduces considerable complexity and distracts from the core goals at the introductory level. It seems preferable to give fuller coverage of OO design and implementation methodology to later in the curriculum to allow more focused concentration on basics at the introductory level.

I can buy that. That’s a valid criti-
cism, and it does consider where ob-
jects do fit into the curriculum. The
Harper blog post paints all of OO with
a Java brush. Alan Kay recently said in
a comment to a post in my Computing
Education Blog, “By my original defini-
tion of ‘Object oriented,’ neither Java
nor C++ is OO.” Message sending in
Smalltalk and Self is both object-orient-
ed and easily made parallel. Because
Java doesn’t work for the purpose, all
of object-oriented programming is “un-
suitable” and must be “eliminated”?