<\/a>
\nI finally got around to listening to this interview with Smalltalk Dave Thomas<\/a> (as opposed to Ruby’s Dave Thomas) from the Agile Toolkit Podcast<\/a>. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this puppy, and curriculum design would be a totally different animal if more academics were listening to people like Thomas.<\/p>\n

He’s clearly a big fan of functional languages and tools<\/p>\n

\nIt’s really too bad we didn’t actually keep that course that taught those students functional programming and make them see Haskell or Scheme.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and also argues that JavaScript (a) is huge (in small part because Google just uses it so much, and so well) and (b) is essentially Scheme with a different (nastier, in his opinion) syntax. We teach a little JavaScript in an introductory non-majors course, but I think we almost entirely don’t touch it after that. Hmmm… Maybe we need to look into that.<\/p>\n

Also, and not surprisingly given his Smalltalk history, he’s big into duck typing (like Smalltalk and Ruby) and not a big fan of heavyweight static typing. I twitch a little when I hear this stuff because static typing has always been a big deal in my universe, especially in teaching. An interesting take on this, though, is that<\/p>\n

\nTest first really does the same thing as a typechecker, and in fact it does a little more.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My graduate experience at UT<\/a> was very much a formalist experience, with lots of emphasis on formal methods and static types. Clearly there’s an alternative model here where serious test driven development provides the safety and correctness. You obviously need the discipline to make this work, but you arguably need discipline to do any<\/em> sort of interesting software development well. Taking that as your premise, however, would lead to a very different curriculum model than most traditional arrangements.<\/p>\n

What would a curriculum look like if you took agile methods and test driven development as your key premises from the very<\/em> beginning. If all the early assignments were all unit tests that need to be passed? (The students would be writing their own tests for later assignments.) If everything was done in pairs\/teams? If you emphasized dynamic tools and languages, using heavy tests to keep the quality high?<\/p>\n

I’ll leave everyone with this very cool (for someone who teaches this stuff) line:<\/p>\n

\nThere is going to be an acute shortage of talented software people.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We all (and I mean everyone<\/em> in our society) have come to seriously depend on software, so we all<\/em> need talented people to be doing that work. This means we need to be encouraging bright young people to consider software development and computer science as an important and exciting option. We need to provide curricula that challenge, excite, and<\/em> prepare them. I think we’re doing a good job at Morris<\/a>, but could do better. Unfortunately, I think there are still way too schools that are stuck somewhere in the mid-80’s (“Hey, objects are actually pretty cool!”).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I finally got around to listening to this interview with Smalltalk Dave Thomas (as opposed to Ruby’s Dave Thomas) from the Agile Toolkit Podcast. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this puppy, and curriculum design would be a totally different animal if more academics were listening to people like Thomas. He’s clearly a big … Continue reading “A different kind of computing curriculum? – Thoughts on an interview with Smalltalk Dave”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,17,15,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-education","category-science","category-web-development"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p90sy-av","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":701,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2007\/11\/19\/a-wonderfully-different-way-to-thing-about-computing\/","url_meta":{"origin":651,"position":0},"title":"A wonderfully different way to thing about computing","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"19 Nov 07","format":false,"excerpt":"One of my constant struggles as an educator in computer science has been helping students see a bigger picture, look past the mundanities of yesterday's \"help wanted\" page, and see what the world could be rather than what it has been. 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The basic trick is to set up some new e-mail addresses, where one is inside the U.S. and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Computing"","block_context":{"text":"Computing","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/computing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Time to make a long distance call","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/static.flickr.com\/23\/37253128_a0677cc51d_m.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":58,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2005\/02\/11\/bills-and-laws-are-available-in-xml-format\/","url_meta":{"origin":651,"position":4},"title":"Bills and laws are available in XML format","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"11 Feb 05","format":false,"excerpt":"In doing some homework for the REAL ID Act for a class, I was reading the text of the bill at the Library of Congress's excellent Thomas site and discovered that the LoC has been making new bills available in XML format since Feb 2004. Pretty cool, eh? 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In reading this thread from Tufte's Q&A thing (sort of like his blog), he points to this post from the Arms and Influence blog, which\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Computing"","block_context":{"text":"Computing","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/computing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"PowerPoint Phluff explaining how the occupation phase of the current Iraq war was going to work.","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/armsandinfluence.typepad.com\/photos\/arms_and_influence_refere\/ppt1s.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}