One thing that bugs me is the Hello World example. While I completely agree that the Ruby is example is far cleaner, the Java/C/C++/C# example doesn't add much confusion in my experience teaching intro programming. The concept of classes is often confusing, but setting aside the code isn't much of a mental challenge for any student I've met.
It just feels like its the wrong place to have the discussion of magic. The places I see students get tripped up is with iterators, recursion, classes, byref, and metaprogramming.
I think the standard ceremony vs convention concern that people in the blogosphere love to talk about is generally a non-issue for almost everyone except those people who like to blog about it. Show how those other issues are made simple, yet don't miss important facts, with Ruby (or whichever language you think is most effective) and you've made a powerful case (note, I think this is largely the argument as to why SICP is so well regarded as it did a decent job on most of those).
> The concept of classes is often confusing, but setting aside the code isn't much of a mental challenge for any student I've met.
While I have little formal teaching experience, I hung around in the undergraduate lounge in school, which is where students came for help. I ended up helping a lot of non-majors with their first CS class, which was popular because it filled a general requirement for an Arts and Sciences degree.
These two classes were in Java and in VB6, and they struggled with anything that wasn't near-rote application. They had trouble with the scoping of variables, they didn't know when to use functions appropriately... if you say 'what does x = 5 do?' they can answer, but they can't apply that to writing new programs.
My friends who are TAing courses now have several students who end up turning in homework that doesn't even compile. Maybe students at your school are just smarter than mine, but a lot of people struggle here.
> It just feels like its the wrong place to have the discussion of magic.
It's true, I am conflating 'magic' slightly. I don't mean 'they can't properly metaprogram,' I mean it in the "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" sense. They struggle to apply what they see as magic incantations to new problems, because they don't have a solid foundation to work with.
So I taught intro CS for CS majors. I can totally believe that for a subset of non-CS majors this could be more problematic.
My old submission program wouldn't let them turn in programs that won't compile (nor will it let them submit without it passing the example tests I gave them).
This was about eight years ago... Maybe students just aren't as smart anymore ;-)
One thing that bugs me is the Hello World example. While I completely agree that the Ruby is example is far cleaner, the Java/C/C++/C# example doesn't add much confusion in my experience teaching intro programming. The concept of classes is often confusing, but setting aside the code isn't much of a mental challenge for any student I've met.
It just feels like its the wrong place to have the discussion of magic. The places I see students get tripped up is with iterators, recursion, classes, byref, and metaprogramming.
I think the standard ceremony vs convention concern that people in the blogosphere love to talk about is generally a non-issue for almost everyone except those people who like to blog about it. Show how those other issues are made simple, yet don't miss important facts, with Ruby (or whichever language you think is most effective) and you've made a powerful case (note, I think this is largely the argument as to why SICP is so well regarded as it did a decent job on most of those).