This question makes me wonder... why is explicit recursion taught first? [...]
Perhaps also because teachers, being older than their students, are often
mired in outdated thinking.
On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 3:35 PM, Jake McArthur
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Jonathan Cast wrote: | You know, this might actually need to be looked into. | | You need to know recursion and pattern-matching to *write* re-usable | higher-order functions, but how appropriate is that as the first thing | taught?
An excellent question!
Coincidentally, I was just having a conversation with my girlfriend about programming with "building blocks." She described her main hurdle with programming at the moment, which is getting over the fact that she is used to working with tangible objects that you just put together in the appropriate way and her mind expects programming to work the same way, but it doesn't, at least in the languages she has looked at so far. I hypothesized that a language emphasizing combinators might be more intuitive to her than a language emphasizing loops and imperative steps for precisely this reason. I'm not entirely sure that she bought it, but she seemed to agree that it at least sounds nice in theory.
Now I just have to convince her to become a willing subject in this experiment. ;)
This question makes me wonder... why is explicit recursion taught first? I can't help but think now that it may be because those coming from imperative languages are used to writing loops, and recursion is the closest to loops that we have.
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