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Note that nowhere do these learning goals mention gaining deep expertise in any particular programming language! On the contrary, this course is about learning to work effectively in languages of which you know very little. At the end of the semester, having encountered a dozen or so new programming languages, you will not know any of those languages well — but you will be prepared to encounter the next dozen new languages that come your way with greater ease and confidence. It will sometimes be frustrating to work in languages you barely know. When this happens, remember that learning to be comfortable working with the unfamiliar is the point! Intro CS classes build up programming knowledge for you in small, logical pieces, like Legos. You are moving beyond that now. Experiment, explore, and embrace the unknown.

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Note that nowhere do these learning goals mention gaining deep expertise in any particular programming language! On the contrary, this course is about learning to work effectively in languages of which you know very little. At the end of the semester, having encountered a dozen or so new programming languages, you will not know any of those languages well — but you will be prepared to encounter the next dozen new languages that come your way with greater ease and confidence. It will sometimes be frustrating to work in languages you barely know. When this happens, remember that learning to be comfortable working with the unfamiliar is the point! Intro CS classes build up programming knowledge for you in small, logical pieces, like Legos. You are moving beyond that now. Experiment, explore, and embrace the unknown.
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Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 20-Mar-2025 03:20:49 JST Paul Cantrell
in reply to

@quephird @jrose
The Programming Languages course I teach is built around this idea of tinkering with the unfamiliar as a way of learning underlying patterns, and learning how to learn — as opposed to preparing students specifically for graduate research in programming languages (“this semester, we will build a subset of OCaml in OCaml”) or offering a utilitarian checklist of specific language paradigms and language features. (Both of those can be good courses, but they’re not the one I teach!)
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In conversation about 2 months ago from hachyderm.io permalink