How does your school/university teach it? What have been the pros and cons of that choice?
Obviously, teaching students logical and foundational concepts is the most important part, but a student’s first programming language does color their internalization of the concepts and how they approach solving different problems. For example, OOP is really hard to grasp coming from a functional background. Learning how to manage memory efficiently and use appropriate data types is really hard coming from an interpreted language like Python or Javascript. What have you and your peers decided works best for you and your students?
I’ve been advocating for a CS50 style course at an introductory level. A little bit of python, some light data science labs with an SQLite database, throw some javascript at it to make some quick and dirty web representation. Really, all we want out of students are basic problem-solving skills, a familiarity with programming basics, and for students to be excited to learn more. I’ve got one other instructor in the department on board with this approach, but the rest are still having a little bit of trouble moving our courses out of the 1990s.
Awesome! I hope you can drag them along.