Allison ParrishApr 18, 2017
hey mastodon, throw all your programming pedagogy links at me. I teach a lot of beginner programmers and I want to get better at it!
Show threadᏒ๐ϲoᴄo Ⅿoԁｅm ᏴaｓіliｓkApr 18, 2017

@aparrish How experimental are you willing to go?

I have some theoretical justifications for teaching beginners to solve simple problems in a variety of esolangs. 😉

Show threadAllison ParrishApr 18, 2017
@enkiv2 I am willing to be extremely experimental tbh
Show threadᏒ๐ϲoᴄo Ⅿoԁｅm ᏴaｓіliｓkApr 18, 2017

@aparrish
My thesis is basically: most of *deep* programming knowledge is getting the flexibility to paradigm shift, & the easiest way to get that is exposure to lots of paradigms. Most of the difficulty in learning real languages is memorizing inessential syntax details.

Esolangs are all paradigm and no syntax, so they can be learned more quickly because they make no consessions to reality.

Solving the same problem in brainfuck, befunge, pure prolog, and forth will level you up.

Show threadᏒ๐ϲoᴄo Ⅿoԁｅm ᏴaｓіliｓkApr 18, 2017
@aparrish
But, a simpler way to do this would be to choose a couple problems and show very different ways of implementing them. (Say, showing where a loop makes more vs less sense than recursion)
Show threadAllison Parrish
@enkiv2 that makes sense. I'd love to see a whole curriculum designed around this and similar ideas (or at least some academic literature to help prove to my department that we should adopt something like it 🤔)
Apr 18, 2017 at 7:35pmWeb