Scala for CS1

[Cody Koeninger]

One of the topics that came up in discussion at the meetup was how well- (or ill-) suited scala was for teaching CS.

Mark Lewis at Trinity University in San Antonio wrote a scala textbook and is teaching intro CS courses using it.  The book has a series of videos associated with it as well.  Haven't read the book or watched the videos yet, but it's probably worth a look.

http://www.programmingusingscala.net/

He actually makes a pretty interesting argument on that site for why it's a good teaching language.

[Jason Baldridge]

Nice to see this! I've been pretty happy with using Scala for the programming side of computational linguistics classes I've taught at UT Austin, though I admit there were times when I felt that Python would have been better for the non-CS students. If anyone is interested, I did a bunch of beginner Scala tutorials (like, very much for beginners), and the most complete set of links to those, plus lots of other useful Scala links, are here:

https://github.com/utcompling/applied-nlp/wiki/Links

Also, my student Dan Garrette is covering my natural language processing course while I'm on leave this semester, and he is using Scala for that:

http://utcompling.github.io/nlpclass-fall2013/
http://utcompling.github.io/nlpclass-fall2013/scala/

-Jason

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Jason Baldridge
Associate Professor, Dept. of Linguistics, UT Austin
Co-founder & Chief Scientist, People Pattern
http://www.jasonbaldridge.com
http://twitter.com/jasonbaldridge

[Norman Richards]

On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 9:29 AM, Jason Baldridge <jasonba...@gmail.com> wrote:

Nice to see this! I've been pretty happy with using Scala for the programming side of computational linguistics classes I've taught at UT Austin, though I admit there were times when I felt that Python would have been better for the non-CS students.  [...]

I'd be curious what people thought.  For all of it's technical might, Scala does not strike me as a language suitable for beginners - though maybe if you limit it to just a subset you'd get more than enough power without the all the confusing bits?

[Jason Baldridge]

Yeah, you do need to try to limit things a good deal, but there are some things that you just can't get around. For a purely linguistics (or other liberal arts) crowd, I'd likely to do Python again, but for a CS crowd I'll take Scala every time.

-Jason

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