Mastodawn

Today, thanks to a former PhD student, I learned that LLMs are terrible at generating Whitespace code: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.09678

Also today, I was invited (and I am accepting) to join a group on redesigning our undergraduate curriculum, which includes discussions on our choice of first programming language.

I am not saying that these things are related. I just happen to be mentioning them both at once because I saw them both today. You get a lot of characters in one toot after all.

What?

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Peter H. Fröhlich

@edwinb That "choice of first programming language" debate is full of so many proverbial land mines and intellectually cringe arguments that I am glad (very, very glad) that I never had to ACTUALLY "go through it" during my entire academic career. So here's to you, person I don't know: Give 'em hell! Go down in a blaze of glory! Never give in, never give up! Propose Java first, but don't accept questions later either! And punch out the inevitable brainiac wizard early on by leaving out a base case! All that. 🍿 😇