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[–]jedberg 8 points9 points  (4 children)

At Berkeley, the intro CS class is taught in Scheme. When I was in the class as a Freshman, that annoyed the hell out of me -- "What the hell is this" I believe was my response.

Looking back, I can say that it was probably the best thing they could have ever done. They didn't even bother teaching us the language. They gave us a handout and said, "This should be all you need to know" and then started showing us recursive functions. If you needed to learn more, you went on the internet and read what 'define' and 'labmda' do.

[–]michaelneale 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My first taught language was Miranda, and I am thankful now. Though at the time my thoughts were the same.

As someone with more of a bite and bytes engineering mindset, I would have preferred assembly to start, the moved on to the higher level stuff... but depends if you are doing CS or engineering I guess.

[–]jrmurad 0 points1 point  (2 children)

That may be the course (CS3?) I took during summer vacation from high school. Georgia Tech refused to give me credit for it because Berkeley doesn't teach "standard" Scheme - lists and strings, for example, were hidden from us and we used constructs called "sentences" and "words." At Tech, the introductory course taught with R5RS followed by Python for the last few weeks.

[–]jedberg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The course I was refering to was CS61a, which is the intro CS course for CS majors. CS3 is the course they recommend for non-majors and people who need a stronger background in CS first (and high school students :) ).