Full disclosure - I took 3 classes in Racket: Intro to CS, Programming Languages, and Compilers.
> Racket is not a very popular language in teaching communities
This list of schools with introductory Racket classes isn't accurate, because the author did not look beyond the naming of the courses on the Github page. My school was missed.
> Students are unlikely to have had prior experience with Racket
This is good because it means students from varying backgrounds of programming experience start from a level playing field.
> Racket’s aesthetic beauty has limited relevance to CS1
Computer Science is first and foremost an ivory tower and students are (imo) better off being confronted with this fact up front. Software Engineering is probably better taught with a more practical language.
> Students do not use Racket again later in their degree
At my school the Programming Languages core curriculum all used Racket. A good percentage of students funneled into at least the first PL-core class as part of their requirements. The class was very popular.
> Students do not like Racket
Sorry, but I don't think we should base our decisions on what Intro students like/dislike. People hate leaving their comfort zone - that doesn't mean they shouldn't be pushed out of it.
> The Design Recipe Is Not Well-Evidenced
Valid criticisms. On the other hand, no evidence is presented that other languages are better.
> At my school the Programming Languages core curriculum all used Racket. A good percentage of students funneled into at least the first PL-core class as part of their requirements. The class was very popular.
Although the article didn't cover it, I think it's important that in the industry, students will be able to find a job/internship that uses Python more than Racket. If both languages achieve the goal of introducing students to CS, why not use something that could benefit students more?
That is kind of the killer, isn't it? 10+ years of Racket and students still hate it. If they can learn introductory CS without suffering through Racket, why force them to do so? (Disclaimer: I think Racket looks interesting but I have never tried to use it for a project.)
But why not allow students to vote with their feet? Offer Racket and Python and see which course's graduates do better in the rest of the major.
There is no reason computer science needs to be steeped in academia. The only reason why it is so popular in the first place is because it is so practical and applied. Easy to profit from. If you worship your ivory towers, feel free to become a mathematician.
I write Python, amongst other things, professionally and have been playing with Racket in the sidelines. I recently started a new project and decided to take the plunge and write it entirely in Racket, so I can actually learn it better: its (extensive) standard library, idioms, quirks, etc. in a real (rather than toy) engineering setting.
Now I love Racket. Whether it’s Racket, or Scheme, or Racket facilitating Scheme, it doesn’t matter, I haven’t had so much fun coding for a long long time! Of course my job isn’t concerned about my enjoyment (at least not primarily), but it turned out to be no harder to code the project than it would have been in Python.
I’m heavily biased towards functional style and I appreciate that this is completely anecdotal, but I’d urge people to jump in :) It took me about a week to become productive in the language and, to be honest, most of that was getting over S-expression syntax and correctly pairing deeply nested parentheses. The documentation alone is a thing to behold! While it’s true that the community is smaller than Python’s, it’s friendly and eager to help; say on StackOverflow, r/Racket or IRC.
I hope I can continue writing it professionally and can convince others in my team to adopt it.
Ive been programming for 20 years and recently started playing in racket and all my faded enthusiasm sprung back and got excited about programming again. Is it that its a new thing to me and we like new shiny things? Well, I find thats not the case. To me it feels that I can express ideas/idioms much much easier within Racket/scheme and after a few weeks i started enjoying the parens quite a bit. I’ve also been playing with htdp libraries and it’s been quite fun, simple and effective. My new personal projects are going to be in Racket now.
Python is a terrible choice as a first language. Idiomatic python is just glue code that obfuscates the underlying algorithms.
Object oriented programming (implementation inheritance) is increasingly regarded as an antipattern, and it encourages that too.
The massive performance penalty of writing logic in python vs calling out to external libraries mostly forces developers to program by lego-brick assembling external modules instead of reasoning about algorithm design.
There’s no concept of types, either, and instead of attempting to detect programming errors early on, it leaves them to runtime.
It’s not surprising that Java and also C/C++ are more popular than python for introductory CS courses.
(I could see using python as an intro course for non-CS majors, fwiw.)
Python is a great first language, because you can learn the basics in an afternoon, but it is still capable of handling (and actually used for) many real-world tasks from robotics to games to scientific computing.
Its low barrier to entry, high reward/effort ratio and quick feedback loop make a good way to recruit potential CS majors!
As others have mentioned, Python's slowness can also require you to pick good algorithms, and its minimal compile-time error checking means that you really need to test your code well and also handle unexpected runtime errors. ;-)
BASIC is a great first language for similar reasons.
Performance is largely irrelevant for the first teaching language. You can completely ignore OOP (unlike Java) if you want, although you probably should teach students about it at some point. Python doesn't have "no concept of types".
I have TA'd different intro classes that started with those languages, and Python IMHO makes a way better first language than C or Java. Start with it, introduce other languages and their concepts later. I've heard mixed things about starting with functional languages, but I think it can work too.
Yes, you don't have to complete bonkers OO with multiple inheritance, but in general OO is a win.
Also, python has a pretty good standard library and a pretty elegant module system.
There's also a practical consideration. After you learn python, you will know python. It is a useful language with hooks into just about every endeavor you could do on a computer.
It doesn't matter it’s slower than C/++ or Java . In fact, that’s an advantage; you want your algorithms to be fast because they’re actually good, not just because your hardware is fast.
I think you completely missed the point on what algorithms are.
This is absolutely hilarious. Students are comfortable with C/C++ and Java the most. I guess they haven't seen segmentation faults and null pointer exceptions enough in production ruining businesses yet.
It is kind of funny how almost all of my peers who studied CS ended up wanting to work on ML languages (F#, OCaml, Haskell, etc.) after spending 10+ years with Java, C, C++ or C#. At the time they were learning Prolog and SML they did not like it much. This survey should be done after some time spent on deploying production ready applications for living and see how it will change.
This entire post utterly strains credulity. It has the vibe of a bad Facebook post that your relatives shares that makes you groan.
Halfway through I find myself doubting not merely the authors thesis but wondering if it's meant to poke fun or entertain.
Can statements like
>The hardest thing to capture in this site is the trauma in some students’ eyes.
> I have also seen first-hand the trauma that it has caused students.
possibly be meant seriously?
Was racket the wrong tool to teach programming or did it eat their dog and set fire to their dorm?
I picture Michael Keaton appearing after Geena Davis says c++ c++ c++ saying wait until they get a load of me.
Everything has a certain amount of cognitive overhead. Perceptively python and racket both have fairly low overhead and quick feedback and ought to be in the same ballpark insofar as learning basics.
I wonder if discontent as described derives from dissimilarity with existing material.
A person with some knowledge but not much may be disproportionately dissatisfied with not being able to use such. Speculating that the best students have no problem, the worst students blame the instructor or the materials, the bottom middling who know a little python or Javascript are frustrated that they cannot benefit from existing skills.
Students perception of value of instruction may be a useful metric for the school insofar as attracting students but one questions if the students are the best qualified at the start of their education to access the value of individual components of their education.
"Which programming language" to start with is something people can have strong opinions on.
(e.g. I could understand people saying C is a great language to start with, or that C is a terrible language
to start with).
There are always going to be reasons why any language will be bad as a first language to learn. I'm sure there will be reasons why a language would be a good one to learn.
Python is a nice language to start with. I think Racket is a nice language to start with, too.
The intro to programming course I took was loosely based off of SICP. (My batch was the last taught using Scheme; the next was taught the same material using a subset of JavaScript).
As an example of something nicer about Racket than Python: There was a nice 'simplicity' to the material. A list is either empty, or some item followed by a list. Computing stuff either deals with a base case, or deals with a recursive case. Almost all the functions we used (car, cdr, map, accumulate, member, etc.) could be implemented with what we'd learned. -- This feels more analogous to seeing how the proof works rather than learning just a bunch of formulae.
Being in lock-down mode, I thought it would be a good time to finish reading (and doing) the "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" that I started many years ago and abandoned. Ever since I read Paul Graham's essays on Lisp, I dreamed that I'd like to be able do build domain specific languages "when I grow up". Life always gets in the way, but I now decided to give Lisp another chance.
And now this. Hm, should I abandon SICP again? Maybe the guy is right that beyond all the grand philosophizing of the amazing power of Lisp there's little substance. On the other hand, I also know the website I'm posting this comment on is built on Lisp. I'm torn.
That's not what he's saying at all. He's saying that it may not be the right language for an intro CS course for typical freshmen. One can argue back and forth about that. But if you want to learn deeper concepts about programming that go beyond a typical intro to CS class, SCIP is a great book and Scheme a great language, and I'm sure the author of this article would agree 100%.
I think most people here are commenting as graduates/professional so I thought I would chime in.
As a student, I love being taught in Python for introductory CS classes. I have been a course assistant as well.
The language is easy to pick and has great/easy applications that doesn't require learning another additional language.
(I am not opposed to learning another and carry the sentiment that you can relatively pick up another language.)
The second part is important to me as a student because I can quickly use it in my web programming projects, in my data-related projects and for scripting purposes as well(I admit I rarely do this).
Great read. I’m a senior studying comp sci at University of Delaware, and I couldn’t agree more! We learned Racket freshmen year - and I can confidently say that Racket had no perceivable advantage to my computer science education over any other language. In fact, the course introduced python towards the end of the semester which made it more of a headache since we had to take a final exam in both syntaxes. It would’ve been better to have used python from the start.
Note: the title is overstated, this is actually a pretty good discussion of Racket and not just the kind of bashing you would think from a title “I hate Racket”.
We did CS courses in C and C++ 22 years ago. I recently did an MsC program at the same University and most courses are being done using Java. But for assignments teachers allow any programming language - if the task permits - so I did mine in C#. Some colleagues used Java, one guy used Python.
Could not agree more. Top schools like MIT gave up on their silly dedication to obscure languages in introductory programming classes and switched to Python. It seems like there was a generation of professors who decided there was a “correct” way to teach computer science and it involved languages completely isolated from the mainstream industry. It’s like teaching someone grammar by forcing them to use Esperanto because it’s “The Best” language (according to tenured professor who doesn’t give a shit about their students).
All Turing complete languages can execute any program. The fundamentals of programming exist in all languages. Teach students using languages with the absolute minimal friction so they aren’t spooked in their first exposure to programming.
Academia has scared away an untold number of aspiring students with their nonsense languages. Such a damn waste of talent. The absolute worst programmers in terms of craftsmen-ship are academics - if you want to see some truly WTF code look at what underpins research papers.
That's ridiculous. It's computer science, not computer programming technician. You teach with the tool that most clearly distills the principles of what you're trying to teach. Racket and Scheme arguably do that much better than Python.
In fact, Racket 15 years ago still has more cutting edge features than Python has to this day. There is simply no language that provides the breadth of features available in Racket, and I don't even use it.
> Academia has scared away an untold number of aspiring students with their nonsense languages
A programmer that's scared or intimidated by learning a new language does not belong in this industry. You might as well say that we should coddle civil engineering students that are scared of computers. If this is a barrier you can't surmount, consider another career.
> It’s like teaching someone grammar by forcing them to use Esperanto
Or Latin, which for the longest time wasn't called "Latin", but simply something that was taught in "grammar school", because it addresses the underlying fundamentals quite clearly without getting bogged down with semantics. Latin is still used for that, btw, but only in "top schools".
>Teach students using languages with the absolute minimal friction
Say, something with a trivial syntax; something that is easy to express any construct in without too many preconceptions of what a programming language should look like.
skillpass|5 years ago
> Racket is not a very popular language in teaching communities
This list of schools with introductory Racket classes isn't accurate, because the author did not look beyond the naming of the courses on the Github page. My school was missed.
> Students are unlikely to have had prior experience with Racket
This is good because it means students from varying backgrounds of programming experience start from a level playing field.
> Racket’s aesthetic beauty has limited relevance to CS1
Computer Science is first and foremost an ivory tower and students are (imo) better off being confronted with this fact up front. Software Engineering is probably better taught with a more practical language.
> Students do not use Racket again later in their degree
At my school the Programming Languages core curriculum all used Racket. A good percentage of students funneled into at least the first PL-core class as part of their requirements. The class was very popular.
> Students do not like Racket
Sorry, but I don't think we should base our decisions on what Intro students like/dislike. People hate leaving their comfort zone - that doesn't mean they shouldn't be pushed out of it.
> The Design Recipe Is Not Well-Evidenced
Valid criticisms. On the other hand, no evidence is presented that other languages are better.
kyawzazaw|5 years ago
Although the article didn't cover it, I think it's important that in the industry, students will be able to find a job/internship that uses Python more than Racket. If both languages achieve the goal of introducing students to CS, why not use something that could benefit students more?
musicale|5 years ago
That is kind of the killer, isn't it? 10+ years of Racket and students still hate it. If they can learn introductory CS without suffering through Racket, why force them to do so? (Disclaimer: I think Racket looks interesting but I have never tried to use it for a project.)
But why not allow students to vote with their feet? Offer Racket and Python and see which course's graduates do better in the rest of the major.
ampdepolymerase|5 years ago
Xophmeister|5 years ago
Now I love Racket. Whether it’s Racket, or Scheme, or Racket facilitating Scheme, it doesn’t matter, I haven’t had so much fun coding for a long long time! Of course my job isn’t concerned about my enjoyment (at least not primarily), but it turned out to be no harder to code the project than it would have been in Python.
I’m heavily biased towards functional style and I appreciate that this is completely anecdotal, but I’d urge people to jump in :) It took me about a week to become productive in the language and, to be honest, most of that was getting over S-expression syntax and correctly pairing deeply nested parentheses. The documentation alone is a thing to behold! While it’s true that the community is smaller than Python’s, it’s friendly and eager to help; say on StackOverflow, r/Racket or IRC.
I hope I can continue writing it professionally and can convince others in my team to adopt it.
tartoran|5 years ago
hedora|5 years ago
Object oriented programming (implementation inheritance) is increasingly regarded as an antipattern, and it encourages that too.
The massive performance penalty of writing logic in python vs calling out to external libraries mostly forces developers to program by lego-brick assembling external modules instead of reasoning about algorithm design.
There’s no concept of types, either, and instead of attempting to detect programming errors early on, it leaves them to runtime.
It’s not surprising that Java and also C/C++ are more popular than python for introductory CS courses.
(I could see using python as an intro course for non-CS majors, fwiw.)
musicale|5 years ago
Its low barrier to entry, high reward/effort ratio and quick feedback loop make a good way to recruit potential CS majors!
As others have mentioned, Python's slowness can also require you to pick good algorithms, and its minimal compile-time error checking means that you really need to test your code well and also handle unexpected runtime errors. ;-)
BASIC is a great first language for similar reasons.
detaro|5 years ago
I have TA'd different intro classes that started with those languages, and Python IMHO makes a way better first language than C or Java. Start with it, introduce other languages and their concepts later. I've heard mixed things about starting with functional languages, but I think it can work too.
dragonwriter|5 years ago
Python is strongly typed, and while it doesn't mandate static type checking, it has several AOT static type checkers available.
It's not Haskell, but then neither are most languages that mandate static type checking.
m463|5 years ago
Yes, you don't have to complete bonkers OO with multiple inheritance, but in general OO is a win.
Also, python has a pretty good standard library and a pretty elegant module system.
There's also a practical consideration. After you learn python, you will know python. It is a useful language with hooks into just about every endeavor you could do on a computer.
h8hawk|5 years ago
You might look at this answer: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Python-not-a-suitable-language-...
zwaps|5 years ago
Can you explain this? I am not a CS major, but I find using classes quite useful.
andreilys|5 years ago
https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.html
Also why is OOP considered an anti-pattern?
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
StreamBright|5 years ago
Java: 93% C/C++: 74% Python: 38% JavaScript: 21% Racket: 7%
This is absolutely hilarious. Students are comfortable with C/C++ and Java the most. I guess they haven't seen segmentation faults and null pointer exceptions enough in production ruining businesses yet.
It is kind of funny how almost all of my peers who studied CS ended up wanting to work on ML languages (F#, OCaml, Haskell, etc.) after spending 10+ years with Java, C, C++ or C#. At the time they were learning Prolog and SML they did not like it much. This survey should be done after some time spent on deploying production ready applications for living and see how it will change.
michaelmrose|5 years ago
Halfway through I find myself doubting not merely the authors thesis but wondering if it's meant to poke fun or entertain.
Can statements like
>The hardest thing to capture in this site is the trauma in some students’ eyes.
> I have also seen first-hand the trauma that it has caused students.
possibly be meant seriously?
Was racket the wrong tool to teach programming or did it eat their dog and set fire to their dorm?
I picture Michael Keaton appearing after Geena Davis says c++ c++ c++ saying wait until they get a load of me.
Everything has a certain amount of cognitive overhead. Perceptively python and racket both have fairly low overhead and quick feedback and ought to be in the same ballpark insofar as learning basics.
I wonder if discontent as described derives from dissimilarity with existing material.
A person with some knowledge but not much may be disproportionately dissatisfied with not being able to use such. Speculating that the best students have no problem, the worst students blame the instructor or the materials, the bottom middling who know a little python or Javascript are frustrated that they cannot benefit from existing skills.
Students perception of value of instruction may be a useful metric for the school insofar as attracting students but one questions if the students are the best qualified at the start of their education to access the value of individual components of their education.
rgoulter|5 years ago
There are always going to be reasons why any language will be bad as a first language to learn. I'm sure there will be reasons why a language would be a good one to learn.
Python is a nice language to start with. I think Racket is a nice language to start with, too.
The intro to programming course I took was loosely based off of SICP. (My batch was the last taught using Scheme; the next was taught the same material using a subset of JavaScript).
As an example of something nicer about Racket than Python: There was a nice 'simplicity' to the material. A list is either empty, or some item followed by a list. Computing stuff either deals with a base case, or deals with a recursive case. Almost all the functions we used (car, cdr, map, accumulate, member, etc.) could be implemented with what we'd learned. -- This feels more analogous to seeing how the proof works rather than learning just a bunch of formulae.
credit_guy|5 years ago
And now this. Hm, should I abandon SICP again? Maybe the guy is right that beyond all the grand philosophizing of the amazing power of Lisp there's little substance. On the other hand, I also know the website I'm posting this comment on is built on Lisp. I'm torn.
jbotz|5 years ago
oldsj|5 years ago
craigsmansion|5 years ago
kyawzazaw|5 years ago
As a student, I love being taught in Python for introductory CS classes. I have been a course assistant as well.
The language is easy to pick and has great/easy applications that doesn't require learning another additional language.
(I am not opposed to learning another and carry the sentiment that you can relatively pick up another language.)
The second part is important to me as a student because I can quickly use it in my web programming projects, in my data-related projects and for scripting purposes as well(I admit I rarely do this).
willswire|5 years ago
acheron|5 years ago
DeathArrow|5 years ago
kyawzazaw|5 years ago
seibelj|5 years ago
All Turing complete languages can execute any program. The fundamentals of programming exist in all languages. Teach students using languages with the absolute minimal friction so they aren’t spooked in their first exposure to programming.
Academia has scared away an untold number of aspiring students with their nonsense languages. Such a damn waste of talent. The absolute worst programmers in terms of craftsmen-ship are academics - if you want to see some truly WTF code look at what underpins research papers.
naasking|5 years ago
In fact, Racket 15 years ago still has more cutting edge features than Python has to this day. There is simply no language that provides the breadth of features available in Racket, and I don't even use it.
> Academia has scared away an untold number of aspiring students with their nonsense languages
A programmer that's scared or intimidated by learning a new language does not belong in this industry. You might as well say that we should coddle civil engineering students that are scared of computers. If this is a barrier you can't surmount, consider another career.
craigsmansion|5 years ago
Or Latin, which for the longest time wasn't called "Latin", but simply something that was taught in "grammar school", because it addresses the underlying fundamentals quite clearly without getting bogged down with semantics. Latin is still used for that, btw, but only in "top schools".
>Teach students using languages with the absolute minimal friction
Say, something with a trivial syntax; something that is easy to express any construct in without too many preconceptions of what a programming language should look like.
If only there was a language like that!