Two readings for discussion on Friday:
- Ben-Ari's Understanding Programming Languages (chapter 1)
- Scratch (PDF link), from the November 2009 issue of CACM
The questions I want us to consider for Friday (and you might come up with other points for discussion and debate):
- Why do we have so many programming lnaguages? Isn't one good enough?
- Do we still need more programming languages? Why might that be the case? Why not?
- Scratch claims to be for beginning programmers. Do icons really help?
- Next year, we're replacing Java in our introductory course with Scratch. Is this a good move for the department, or bad? Why or why not?
