Alan:

On Thu, Jul 04, 2002 at 10:23:55AM -0800, Alan Kay wrote:
[big snip]
> 
> >
> >Alan's suggestion (which he re-iterated at the MM in CS Ed workshop, 
> >http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/mmworkshop) is that a first programming 
> >course should be in multiple languages so that students don't latch 
> >on to only one way of thinking.  I've heard him propose assembly 
> >language and LISP as giving students two ends of a spectrum.
> 
> I do think learning multiple ways to program over one's first year is 
> really important. I don't think any of the current paradigms 
> (including ours) is strong or comprehensive enough to serve solely as 
> the first imprint.
>      But timing is everything here. One way to do this in college 
> would be to have a two semester sequence over a year. Perhaps the 
> idea of the first semester is to get fluent in something pretty darn 
> powerful -- such as a suitably prepared version of Squeak as alluded 
> to above. In the second semester other styles could be explored -- 
> and many of them could be in Squeak as well (but perhaps not all). 
> Perhaps the mix of other styles should start earlier. It would be a 
> very good and important experiment to find out. This experiment would 
> be good for NSFers interesting in making things better to fund.

What do you think about the following method:

In my first year of university, our "programming fundamentals" course was
taught with an imaginary language.  There was no compiler for it, it only
existed in the professor's mind (and our nightmares, but that's another
story).  We'd first design everything in this imaginary language, and THEN
we'd translate it to another language (In our case, FORTRAN-77...yes, this
was in 1990 believe it or not).

I can safely say that NO ONE was attached to either the imaginary language
(no one wanted to make a real-world compiler for it), nor FORTRAN-77
(especially!).  However, the 'fundamentals' were imparted to us, without
any kind of language-favouritism.  This was a class that was open to 
freshmen of all shades, not just CS majors.  The second half of this course
switched FORTRAN with Pascal.

I am quite sad that absolutely no form of object-oriented design was taught
at my particular university; that was something I had to pursue on my own.