School Days, School Days

Just a couple random notes today, following up on a few threads and reminiscing about school days.

My old friend and erstwhile professor Prabhakar Ragde has some good comments and related links on my recent posting about trends in Computer Science education in the United States. This is a subject which I know Professor Ragde has been interested in for a long time -- I recall reading a magazine article clipping on his office door in the Davis Center in, oh, must have been 1991, with the headline "Study Shows Women Executives Interupt People As Often As Men". Funny what things stick in one's memory.

Anyway, Professor Ragde has at least three, probably more, ambitious projects underway. First, I assume that he's still maintaining his position as the youngest curmudgeon on campus -- no mean feat given the massive influx of young talent in the CS department alone. Second, it appears that he's attempting to dominate the classical music world by raising highly talented children. Just as ambitious, he's redesigned the introductory computer science curriculum at Waterloo. There are a lot of interesting ideas about functional languages as pedagogic tools in there. Should be fun -- when I took the introductory (non-functional) CS134 course at Waterloo from Professor Ragde in 1991, it was a brand-new course then, and still had a lot of bugs to get worked out -- I recall getting photocopies of the proofreaders' galleys rather than a textbook, for instance. I am very excited and interested to see where this goes.

Introductory courses are hard to design in so many ways. For instance, I noticed when I was taking CS134 that the distribution of marks in the class was bimodal -- there were a big chunk of people getting 95-100% and a big chunk barely passing. Those people in the former group weren't really learning any new technical material, and those people in the latter were struggling to keep up. I think for that reason alone it would be interesting to see how first year students handle functional languages; most high school students have little experience with Scheme, and so not only might the playing field be more level, but everyone might learn some CS fundamentals rather than coasting through easy, old-hat procedural programming.

Introductory courses are also the place where a lot of people discover that they're really not interested in a subject and quit early. That's not necessarily a bad thing -- I'm very glad that I learned early that though I find astrophysics fascinating, I'm really not very good at it. The risk of course is that you end up accidentally getting rid of people who would add value and thrive in a particular profession; the trend lines for women entering computer science are particularly worrisome, as I've already noted. Professor Ragde comments:

I am currently designing a first-year course from scratch and would welcome comment on how it can be more effective at attracting and retaining women in the profession [...] But whatever I do will not be sufficient. We need a general cultural change.

If you've got anything germane to add, comment here and I'll make sure that it gets passed on.

Finally, while Professor Ragde was in the process of proposing his Scheme scheme, a lot of people commented on the proposal. Reading the comments was not only interesting for the varied positions and takes on the subject -- technical, political, pedagogical -- but also because it brought back a lot of fond memories. It's nice to see that many old friends and acquaintances are still active in University politics.

As you can see from my comments (towards the bottom), I was thinking a lot about some of the issues that I've blogged about recently when I wrote them. At the risk of being somewhat redundant, I'll reproduce them here.

Your proposal is quite interesting. I have often wondered why schools concentrate upon teaching principles of object oriented programming.

The most obvious alleged benefit is that OOP languages such as C++, Java, C# are in widespread use in industry. But I don't really buy that argument. Yes, UW is a highly practical school, but still surely the purpose of a UW CS degree is to study theoretical computer science.

And really, most people in industry do not have a good grasp of theoretical OO principles. More: they do not need a good grasp of OO principles except insofar as those principles serve their needs. Heck, I design and implement programming languages for a living and it's not like we're in code reviews saying "Well, Bob, this code works, but doesn't it violate the Liskov Substitution Principle?"

Which brings me to my second point -- why do we have OO principles in the first place? Not because they are cool, I hope. Rather, because OOP is a style of programming which emphasizes encapsulation, abstraction, contracts, information hiding, extension through inheritance, etc, etc, etc. These are things which help in the design and implementation of large scale software.

Super. That's goodness for me -- I work on systems like that. But in an introductory course in computer science, typically the students are working on small, simple programs by themselves. OO languages are not necessarily good pedagogically at the introductory level.

What I sometimes see when I interview people and review code is symptoms of a disease I call Object Happiness. Object Happy people feel the need to apply principles of OO design to small, trivial, throwaway projects. They invest lots of unnecessary time making pure virtual abstract base classes -- writing programs where IFoos talk to IBars but there is only one implementation of each interface! I suspect that early exposure to OO design principles divorced from any practical context that motivates those principles leads to object happiness. People come away as OO True Believers rather than OO pragmatists. Hopefully the co-op program shocks them out of it, but better to not get Happy in the first place.

So I agree with you that earlier exposure to functional programming is a good idea. Not just from a theoretical standpoint, but also from a practical standpoint. I strongly believe that as programming languages evolve we are going to see an increasing number of functional language and declarative language features in mainstream industry production languages. (In the latest version of C#, for example, there is improved support for delegates, moving towards a first-class-function model, and also some support for declarative attributes. But both could be greatly improved further.)

Of course, I might be somewhat biased. I spent five of the last eight years working on JScript, which can be used as an imperative, object-oriented and functional language, and is usually found embedded inside declarative languages such as HTML, XML. (My colleague at Netscape, Waldemar Horwat, once told me that Javascript was just another syntax for Common Lisp -- he was a pretty hard-core functional programmer.)

Come to think of it, JScript might make a very interesting pedagogic language. It's very easy to get productive right away by writing little imperative scripts, it implements functional language features such as closures and anonymous functions, and it has an interestingly non-standard approach to OOP (prototype inheritance).

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 18, 2004
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  March 18, 2004
  I agree quite a lot with Robert above.
  
  Men (we) are probably intested in details for details sake, not because they have a useful application. I belive women are exactly the opposite.
  
  Languages like C/C++ interfaces directly to the tinkerer area of male brains. We love the tinkering and forget the time.
  
  BTW. Whatever makes CS palatable for women will do wonders for us men as well.
  
  Peter Moylan did an interesting experiment which he reported on comp.lang.modula-2. The couse was run using modula-2, but they allowed a project to be done in C. The good students went with C and had problems delivering on time (none did the extra credit stuff). The ordinary students which used Modula-2 had no problems delivering on time.
  
  greetings,
  
  
  
• Anonymous
  March 18, 2004
  <curmudge>"Erstwhile professor?" I am still a professor. And I've never heard raising children referred to as a "project" before.
  </curmudge>
  
  I can't take credit for the design of what I am attempting; that's been done before, by the authors of HtDP and others. I'm only foolish enough to try to port it to UW. I think if I can convince women to take the course, they will like it, but the trick is in getting them to take it. The conventional Java sequence has "practicums" where students solve problems in small groups, highly detailed and structured assignments and lectures, and the possibility of stretching intro programming out over two courses instead of one -- in short, what looks like a better support system, though I think it stifles creativity and fosters dependency. But women tend to underestimate their abilities, and men tend to overestimate theirs. I need to overcome the tendency of women to turn down the opportunity the new course offers because it looks unusual, or difficult, or for the "elite".
  
  Note that the pilot section of CS 134 Eric took was full of people skipping the intro programming course (134 is a "CS 2" course in elementary data structures, and it was their first term of university). I think that was the reason for the bimodality -- men overestimating their abilities. Some of the arguments I got over 135 sounded like "We can't give students choice, because they'll make the wrong choices and then blame us." History gives evidence for this, though I still think it's better than dictating to students what they should do.
  
  Robert: the evidence that the HtDP approach is attractive to women is anecdotal, but apparently a proper study is being done (http://list.cs.brown.edu/pipermail/plt-scheme/2004-February/004887.html and followup). Your conjecture is supported by research described in Margolis and Fisher.
  
  Tarjei: You are right that making CS palatable for women will do wonders for men as well. We don't have a critical mass of women in CS to effect change, so we need to convince men of this fact. The trick is to really do what will make a difference in the right way and not just enrich our positions or make us feel better about ourselves.
  
  --PR
• Anonymous
  March 18, 2004
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• Anonymous
  March 18, 2004
  I'm currently studying a Computer Science degree. In the first year, we started with functional programming, and later on moved to some very basic procedural programming. This year, we've been introduced to the wonders of OOP in Java.
  
  As someone who already had reasonable knowledge of OOP languages, I found this first year somewhat frustrating - but existing programmers were certainly in a level playing field with everyone else, because no one in their right mind had ever touched Haskell!
  
  This year, however, the non-programmers are still struggling to get to grips with Java, and the programmers are coasting.... The functional programming course certainly introduced me to a different way of thinking - and to realise quite how elegant functional programs can be for solving certain problems. However, what my course has failed to do entirely (and this isn't just limited to its programming modules) is demonstrate any sort of "real world" applications for functional programming. Theory is fine - but if no clear benefit or practical use evident from it, then all but the most dedicated students will entirely lose interest.
  
  Just my random 2 cents! :)
• Anonymous
  March 19, 2004
  Are you trying to train Scientists or Engineers? Big difference.
• Anonymous
  March 19, 2004
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• Anonymous
  March 19, 2004
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• Anonymous
  March 19, 2004
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• Anonymous
  March 19, 2004
  Mike - I think the issue at the moment is no-one is really sure why CS doesn't currently appeal - so we should certainly take steps to ensure that the only reason women are not studying CS is because they're not interested.
  
  When I take a look at my current year studying CS, 9 in 10 are male. And yet if you look at those studying something like Mathematics, the figures are much better. To me, that seems to suggest that there must be deeper reasons than "not interested".
• Anonymous
  March 19, 2004
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• Anonymous
  March 23, 2004
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• Anonymous
  March 06, 2007
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• Anonymous
  March 06, 2007
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