Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1535

Tom Linden

I understand the appeal of something like this, but I'm not convinced this is the best way to go about it. Your idea could work well for an upper-division "survey of programming languages" course, but I can't see how it would work for an introductory, lower-division course. I expect so much time would be lost on the learning curve (learning the syntax, etc.), that not much time would be left for teaching the concepts. And that is exactly what I wouldn't want to see happen.

I feel the role of University should be to teach the students the concepts they will need to know and that will be of lasting importance. University doesn't need to teach them every programming language in existence; instead, University should teach them enough so that they can pick up new languages (programming environments, etc.) on their own with ease, and transfer the concepts they have learned to become effective in that language.

For reference, at UC Berkeley we use Scheme in our first introductory course, Java in the second course, and C and buttembly in the third course. This seems to work pretty well: the syntax of Scheme is simple enough that it doesn't get in the way, and one can very quickly get to teaching things like recursion, types, higher-order functions, declarative programming, imperative programming, object-oriented programming, interpreters, and more (all in the first course).

To be clear: These courses are not about Scheme, or Java, or C; rather, they are in Scheme, Java, or C. Our first course is an introduction to programming, taught in Scheme. Our second course is an introduction to data structures, taught in Java. The third course is an introduction to machine structures and architecture, taught in C and buttembly. None of these are primarily about the language; rather, the language is a tool. You get the idea.

It's important to remember that the measure of a computer scientist is not how many languages he-she knows, any more than the measure of an astronomer is how many telescopes he-she has ever used.

I happen to agree.