our instructors, aka teaching faculty, are heroes, every one of them
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Hi just jumping on this thread to ask a Q
I was under the impression that people taught "real" languages in intro courses because of outside (market) pressures. Am I off-base? Or do some faculty just love to teach in extremely unfriendly languages?
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Students want to do internships after their freshman year(!) and that's where the pressure to use "real" languages comes from
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FWIW when I was a freshman at the intro CS course was taught in Haskell. This was 1997. I INCREDIBLY benefited from this and am so grateful that UT did this.
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unfortunately as a professional Haskell programmer I would never recommend subjecting any student to any modern version of GHC ;)
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"Ok kiddos, for HW1 you're going to have to enable these 99 extensions"
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My knowledge of Haskell is from 1997, but it seemed really good back then.
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It's a really fantastic language. It's just also a laboratory for the best cutting-edge type systems research, so some of its dark corners can get a bit spooky.
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it’s also just… really big and has a million different configuration options and extremely intimidating (information-rich) type errors and just generally very much suffers from all the problems industrial-strength languages have that I alluded to at the start of the thread
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The instructor of my undergrad PL course creates his own Prelude now because one surely don't want the students to confuse [(a,b)] with [(1,2),(3,4)] and also deal with Foldable t => t a -> Int. #lang teaching-language makes sense.
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One thing that would be interesting to consider is how to avoid students feeling inferior for having to use the `#lang teaching-language`… maybe it's enough to properly set expectations/understanding at the beginning of the course? Or maybe be careful of what you call it?
There's also the issue of students going off and searching online for answers, and being frustrated at the lack of resources for `teaching-lang`. Maybe having some tips around what they should expect when searching online would help?
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Or you might design some really good pedagogy around Haskell (for instance), have a prelude with nice custom type errors and a gentle on-ramp, but then students might go off and search online for answers, getting confused by the monad tutorials and folks complaining about purity.
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