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Comment by amichail | Hacker News Reader

C++ isn't a good way to introduce people to CS. An introductory class should pick a language that doesn't get in the way so much.

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AP Comp Sci isnt an introductory class.

I had two courses of introduction which were pre-reqs to take that my senior year. These courses were in BASIC. While not the best, they got the job done.

That is correct: AP Comp Sci is not an introductory class.

It is merely a standardized test, with an accompanying standardized curriculum. How schools decide to teach that curriculum is up to them.

For example, I had to take two semesters of Java before I could take the AP/IB CS class; however, my high school currently allows students to enter AP CS (material unique to International Baccalaureate pushed back to an independent study) straight from Honors Algebra II.

It's been in Java since about 2000.

Shame... I remember pointers being the challenging part of the class.

Thats the problem with AP CS in Java. In our school CS 105 is the first programming class, it is C and you basically learn basic io/if/for/while/structs/pointers. If you take the AP class you skip CS 105 and therefore you jump into the next level class without having ever heard what a pointer was, looking for an ArrayList and wondering where the libraries. That next class is C++ and covers OOP and streams and templates and they get lost immediately. Worse, most of the kids in mine got 4 or 5s on the exam, and said they had never created a program from scratch before, since Java has so much boiler plate the teacher would give them a skeleton and they would have to fill in the methods, the whole idea of how to structure a program into functions was never taught to them. It sounded like it did more harm than good to me, I would rather see a high school CS class do some fun python robotics or graphics programming to get people interested and then when they hit college get into the details, don't let them skip the basics by taking a test that doesn't actually replace the amount of knowledge it says it does.

But Java isn't exactly any better.

My youngest sister is taking the AP CS exam next month, and I was helping her study a few weeks ago. The first question she asked me (she's taken a semester and a half of AP CS at this point) was: what's the difference between an Array and an ArrayList?

To explain this, I had to go into: primitives, objects, and references; auto-boxing and un-boxing; generics; memory allocation and garbage collection; the different APIs (one uses length, another uses size)...

About 80% of her textbook was stuff like this. Details of the Java language that have very little to do with learning Computer Science. Only about 20% of her textbook as devoted to "algorithms".

I would say learning the ins and outs of a single language prepares you a lot better for general coding in the real world than learning algorithms does. In day to day work, I haven't ever coded up a linked list, but knowing whether Python passes dict's by reference or by copied value is pretty valuable. I had a fundamental understanding of that based on my previous knowledge of the same in Java.

Prepared to get replaced soon by a guy in India or southeast asia.

Unlikely. Really, is your job so (un)glamorous that you sit around coding the world's next great sorting algorithm?

The point is not to code the next great sorting algorithm the point is to know what sorting algorithm to use.

I only think you should go deep after you learned concepts shallow and wide. It is important that students, very early on, be able to build interesting and meaningful things with their CS skills and experience the associated gratification.

For many people this is essential. My young cousin changed his mind about pursuing CS in college because his HS course work focused too much on tedious details. He was not able to perceive what high-level programs are capable of doing and the power programming as a medium of creative expression. Its a big shame.

That sounds awful. It's a good thing this class is gone!

She's actually taking AP Computer Science A (as opposed to AB, which is the course getting axed). They're both taught in Java.

I'd much rather the course be taught in a language more amenable to teaching computer science (Python, perhaps?). But if it must be Java, better some CS education than none at all.

it was c++ until 2002-2003. 2003-2004 marked the beginning of java.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Computer_Science

I feel old. My high school AP computer class used Pascal running on Apple IIe computers (I worked in C, E, assembly, and Rexx on my Amiga at home, though).

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