Grace for the CS1 Language Wars

We just changed the language for our intro CS course.  That change will probably obscure the underlying pedagogical change we also made for almost anyone outside UBC looking at the courses.

(Side Note: What's the pedagogical change?  From the perspective of someone who has not yet taught the course: A move toward a heavily structured approach to programming in which analysis of the features of a problem naturally leads to the process of solution.)

The language wars in intro CS courses, often called "CS1" courses, are powerful, engaging, frightening, and frequently pointless things.

So, why bother talking about them here?

Because once you start thinking about what you want in a language for your preferred CS1 pedagogy, you rapidly start throwing around words like syntax, semantics, closures, state, mutability, ...  And, understanding and slinging terms like that are part of what CPSC 311 is all about :^)

So, check out Andrew Black, Kim Bruce, and James Noble's thoughts on the syntax of an in-production CS1 language called Grace, particularly the section labeled "Block Semantics".

Grace uses eager evaluation but wants to allow programmers to introduce their own control constructs.  So.. they need to provide a simple syntax for a particular kind of expression.  Which one?

Sounds like an exam question!

Cheers,

Steve