[geeks] Introductory programming language?

[Dr Robert Pasken]

Anything but python, based on the Science, Technology, Engineering and 
Mathematics (STEM) departments experience at my institution. At the 
insistence of the CS department we tried to use python as the intro 
language for STEM majors. The net result was a lot of very drain bramaged 
students who were able to write simple programs before taking the course 
and after taking the course refused to do any programming at all. We 
switched over to a mixture of MatLab and C for STEM majors and it the 
results are dramatic. The MatLab protion of the course gives the students 
the fundamentals of programming with nearly instantaneous feedback. They 
quickly pickup the basics and are able to solve relatively complex 
problems before mid-semester. Two typical problems are determining the 
necessary lengths of muffler pipes to silence a car engine via 
constructive/destructive interference and a numerical weather prediction 
model based on the Barotropic Vorticity equation. Both problems run in the 
range of 200 lines of matlab code. After mid-terms they switch over to C 
to show the advantages of a compiler versus an interpreter. By the end of 
the semester they can solve problems from their major field AND know they 
right kind of tool for the job.

We use the open-source version of MatLab called Octave, which works under 
all unix flavors, MacOS-X and Windows.

Cheers
RWP