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They actually do this at the University of Chicago. That's exactly the introductory sequence.

The first class in the major is in Racket (Standard) or Haskell (Honors).

The second class in the major is in C, and also covers basic UNIX tools.

The third class is in x86 assembly and C, focused on understanding low-level systems.



I wish I was there. My curriculum at Carleton University is

  1. Intro to CS in Python ending with a taste of Java
  2. Java
  3. C (intro to UNIX)
  4. C++ (design first, implement after, waterfall, etc.)
Along with 3 there is data structures taught in Java [0] and with 4 there is web dev taught in Node.js.

0: Following this text: http://opendatastructures.org/ Taught by its author, Dr. Pat Morin.


Actually, the first class is now Java and C++. Morin isn't teaching Python any more.

"Functional" programming is taught in third year (COMP 3007), but you don't get too deep into it.

My issue with the listed classes isn't the chosen languages. A commenter mentioned that you can learn a lot of functional (and other) concepts in a procedural or object oriented language. My issue is that I basically learned the same concepts over and over again, just using different programming languages. You learn to iterate over a multidimensional array in Java, and then you do so again with C, but you have to deallocate and reallocate, and then you do it in C++, but you create an object for the array. It's all the same stuff.


Aha. Do you have an outline of a better way?




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