Does anyone have experience with the book Introduction to Programming and Problem-Solving Using Scala. The claim by the author, Mark Lewis, is that Scala is a perfectly good languages to introduce to students as their first programming language. I’m interested in hearing a counter argument from people who are scala advocates, but might not recommend it to non-programmers???
The main schools that I know of that have used these textbooks outside of Trinity are West Point and Quinnipiac University. I have no idea if the people who taught using them are active on these boards, but you could look them up directly. I think that West Point actually used Scala for CS2 after starting in Python.
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Well I’ve ordered the book from Amazon. If the class turns out to be a success or utter failure, I’ll let you know.
Thanks. I’m planning to write a paper describing the experience of many of the faculty who have used Scala for CS1 and CS2 now that we’ve been using it for about a decade. It isn’t perfect, but I’m not convinced that anything is. I will say that it appears that Scala lays a good foundation for students to pick up other languages. Our students go from Scala to C/C++ and Haskell. I don’t think the transition to C/C++ is any harder than it would be from Java or Python and the transition to Haskell is certainly easier than it would be from Java or Python.
This year we started doing more OO in our CS1 and I also moved from Eclipse to VS Code using sbt. This makes it easier to pull in external libraries, but there are a lot of moving parts that I don’t like. Previously all of CS1 simply used the scripting environment for Scala and I really love the simplicity of that, but it is challenging to bring in GUIs or Graphics as doing those with a Scala syntax requires outside libraries like ScalaFX.