Am 05.10.17 um 19:04 schrieb Steve D'Aprano:
On Thu, 5 Oct 2017 07:29 am, Christian Gollwitzer wrote:
To understand Stefan's way of teaching, take a look at his other
courses, for example the C++ course:
Thanks for this Christian. It has been an eye-opener. More comments below.
You're welcome. Stefan is notorious for posting similar questions in
c.l.c++ for years - asking about minute details of the C++ syntax
(whether or not to call a "number literal" a "numeral" or similar)
accompanied with code examples in a distinct unusual style. He's
actually quite good in finding very concise C++ code for some (mostly
mathematical) problems.
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht81Ht/c++-kurs
There's no link to the original paper, only to secondary sources that discuss
it, e.g.:
http://phys.org/pdf128266927.pdf
so I cannot really judge the quality of the paper. It might be good, it might
be full of holes, there's no way to tell.
Well you could read others who tried to replicate the study and found
partially different results, and especially interpretations:
http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~savel101/fi-msecint/literature/Bock2011.pdf
(1) Programming in Python is NOT a formal system. Most programming isn't, and
Python *in particular* is further away from the mathematical purity of (say)
Haskell.
I think this is the main argument against this way of teaching. As shown
in the subsequent study above, the "formal way" may have an edge over
the concrete examples when the task at hand involves working with
abstract sets - however programming is not about knowing all details of
the syntax. Instead, programming is the skill to break a given task down
into steps and either attacking the subtasks in isolation or finding a
library which does it. Syntax plays a minor role in that skill.
Similarly, in Germany many people learn both Latin and English in high
school. Latin is taught mostly by studying grammar books and learning
vocabulary. English is taught mostly by stories and conversation. Most
students can reasonably communicate in English, but they are usually not
able to form Latin sentences on their own. However they can enumerate
the inflection cases of nouns and verbs.
Christian
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