On How and When to Teach Layers of Abstraction in Programming

harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on Medium

There’s recently been some interesting opinionated writing in the R statistical programming community about how and when to teach the abstracted, easy-to-use approaches to solving problems, versus the underlying nitty-gritty. David Robinson, Data Scientist at Stack Overflow, wrote a blog post recently called Don’t teach students the hard way first. The primary example was on the data-manipulation tools in the tidyverse, versus the underlying methods in base R, but the discussion was mostly about principles in pedagogy. Some highlight quotes from the original article (which I recommend reading!):

Computer Science on Harlan D. Harris

On How and When to Teach Layers of Abstraction in Programming