TITLE: Thoughts at the Start of the Semester
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: August 26, 2011  2:29 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
We have survived Week 1.  This semester, I again get to
teach Programming Languages, a course I love and about
which I blog for a while every eighteen months of so.

I had thought I might blog as I prepped for the course,
but between
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2011-07.html#e2011-07-28T21_20_58.htm">
   my knee</A>
and department duties, time was tight. I've also been slow
to settle on new ideas for the course.  In my blog ideas
folder, I found notes for an entry debriefing the last
offering of the course, from Spring 2010, and thought that
might crystallize some ideas for me.  Alas, the notes held
nothing useful.  They were just a reminder to write, which
went unheeded during
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-05.html#e2010-05-17T17_19_20.htm">
   a May term</A>
teaching
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-06.html#e2010-06-04T16_38_14.htm">
   agile software development</A>.

Yesterday I started reading a new book -- not a book related
to my course, but Roger Rosenblatt's <EM>Unless It Moves the
Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing</EM>.  I love to
read writers talking about writing, and this book has an
even better premise: it is a writer talking about writing as
he teaches writing to novices!  So there is plenty of
inspiration in it for me, even though it contains not a single
line of Scheme or Ruby.

Rosenblatt recounts teaching a course a course called
"Writing Everything".  Most the students in the course want
to learn how to write fiction, especially short stories.
Rosenblatt has them also read write poems, in which they can
concentrate on language and sounds, and essays, in which they
can learn to develop ideas.

This is not the sort of course you find in CS departments.
The first analogy that came to mind was a course in which
students wrote, say, a process scheduler for an OS, a CRUD
database app for a business, and an AI program.  The breadth
and diversity of apps might get the students to think about
commonalities and differences in their programming practice.
But a more parallel course would ask students to write a few
procedural programs, object-oriented programs, and functional
programs.  Each programming style would let the student focus
on different programming concepts and distinct elements of
their craft.

I'd have a great time teaching such a "writing" course.
Writing programs is fun and hard to learn, and we don't have
many opportunities in a CS program to talk about the process
of writing and revising code.  Software engineering courses
have a lot of their own content, and even courses on software
design and development often deal more with new content than
with programming practice.  In most people's minds, there is
not room for a new course like this one in the curriculum.
In CS programs, we have theory and applications courses to
teach.  In Software Engineering programs, they seem far too
serious about imitating other engineering disciplines to
have room for something this soft.  If only more schools
would implement Richard Gabriel's idea of
<A HREF="http://www.dreamsongs.com/MFASoftware.html">
   an MFA in software</A>...

Despite all these impediments, I think a course in which
students simply practiced programming in the large(r) and
focused on their craft could be of great value to most CS
grads.

I will let Rosenblatt's book inspire me and leak into my
Programming Languages course where helpful.  But I will
keep our focus on the content and skills that our curriculum
specifies for the course.  By learning the functional style
of programming and a lot about how programming languages
work, students will get a chance to develop a few practical
skills, which we hope will pay off in helping them to be
better programmers all around, whether in Java, Python,
Ruby, Scala, Clojure, or Ada.

One meta-message I hope to communicate both explicitly and
implicitly is that programmers never stop learning,
including their professor.  Rosenblatt has the same goal in
his writing course:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
I never fail to say "we" to my students, because I do
not want them to get the idea that you ever learn how
to write, no matter how long you've done it.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Beyond that, perhaps the best I can do is let my students
that I am still mesmerized by the cool things we are
learning.  As Rosenblatt says,

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
Observing a teacher who is lost in the mystery of the
material can be oddly seductive.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Once students are seduced, they will take care of their
own motivation and their own learning.  They won't be
able to help themselves.
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