Nice CACM piece on K-12 Education Policy

Cameron Wilson and Peter Harsha have written a nice piece in the September CACM highlighting the challenges in changing K-12 education policy as it relates to computing.  They hit on all the big points, from the challenges of getting computing education to “count” for anything in high schools, to teacher certification, to “No Child Left Behind.”  Of course, I’m also pleased that “Georgia Computes!” gets highlighted.  Recommended for understanding why it’s so hard to get more and better computing education into schools!

Language Choice = f(Number of Copies)

Last night, a user reported a bug in our latest version of JES, the Jython IDE that we use in our Media Computation classes. In cleaning up the code for release, one of the developers renamed the short variable “pict” to “picture”–in all but one spot.  The function that broke (with a “name not found” error in the Jython function) is writePictureTo, a really important function for being able to share the images resulting from playing with Media Computation.  This was particularly disappointing because this release was a big one (e.g., moving from one-based to zero-based indexing) and was our most careful development efforts (e.g., long testing cycle with careful bug tracking).  But at the end, there was a “simple clean-up” that certainly (pshaw!) wasn’t worth re-running the regression tests–or so the developer thought.  And now, Version 3.2.1 and 4.2.1 (for zero and one-based indexing in the media functions) will be out later today.

This has got me wondering about the wisdom of developing an application used by hundreds, if not thousands, of students in Python (or Jython).  I’ve done other “largish” (defined here, for a non-Systems-oriented CS professor, as “anything that takes more than three days to code”) systems in Python.  I built a case library which generated multiple levels of scaffolding from a small set of base case material, called STABLE.  Running the STABLE generator was aggravating because it would run for awhile…then hit one of my typos.  Over and over, I would delete all the HTML pages generated so far, make the 5 second fix, and start the run all over.  It was annoying, but it wasn’t nearly as painful as this bug — requiring everyone who downloaded JES 3.2/4.2 to download it again.

I’m particularly sensitized to this issue after this summer, where I taught workshops (too often) where I literally switched Python<->Java every day.  I became aware of the strengths and weaknesses of each for playing around with media.  Python is by-far more fun for trying out a new idea, generating a new kind of sound or image effect.  But this bug wouldn’t have happened in Java! The compiler would have caught the mis-named variable.  I build another “largish” system in Squeak (Swiki), which also would have caught this bug at compile time.

My growing respect for good compilers doesn’t change my attitude about good first languages for students of computing.  The first language should be fun, with minimal error messages (even at compile time), with rapid response times and lots of opportunities for feedback.   So where does one make the transition, as a student?  Why is it important to have good compilers in one place and not in the other?

I am not software engineering researcher, so I haven’t thought about this as deeply as they have.  My gut instinct is that your choice of language is a function (at least in part) of the number of copies of the code that will ever exist.  If you’re building an application that’s going to live on hundreds, thousands, or millions of boxes, then you have to be very careful — correcting a bug is very expensive.  You need a good compiler helping you find mistakes.  However, if you’re building an application for the Web, I can see why dynamic, scripting languages make so much sense.  They’re fun and flexible (letting you build new features quickly, as Paul Graham describes), and fixing a bug is cheap and easy.  If there’s only one copy of the code, it’s as easy as fixing a piece of code for yourself.

First-time programmers should only be writing code for themselves.  It should be a fun, personal, engaging experience.  They should use programming languages that are flexible and responsive, without a compiler yelling at them.  (My students using Java always complain about “DrJava’s yelling at me in yellow!” when the error system highlights the questionable line of code.)  But they should also be told in no uncertain terms that they should not believe that they are creating code for others.  If they want to produce application software for others, they need to step up to another level of discipline and care in what they do, and that usually means new tools.

I still strongly believe that the first course in computing should not be a course in software engineering.  Students should not have to learn the discipline of creating code for others, while just starting to make sense of the big ideas of computing.  The first course should be personal, about making code for your expression, your exploration, and your ideas.  But when students start building code for others, engineering practice and discipline is required. Just don’t start there.