One of my strongly held beliefs about teaching people to program is that you should not only strive to instill good habits but also try to avoid having students pick up bad ones. This rule isn’t just significant for programming. The general rule that unlearning things is hard applies to…

Similar things should be done with similar syntax. — One of the things that I feel is helpful in a programming language, especially one being taught to novices is “syntactic uniformity” or “syntactic consistency”. Someone mentioned that they weren’t certain what I meant by this phrase, so I’m writing a little post to describe what I mean by it…

One of my favorite future techs of the last decade has been autonomous vehicles. I think they have the ability to create a lot of cool changes in society. Many of those changes will even be positive. For that reason, I’m very sad that they are taking longer than expected…

In a discussion thread on one of my recent posts on dynamically typed languages, someone questioned my assertion that Python IDEs can’t do autocomplete and claimed that I’m using the wrong IDE because their favorite one can. …

In my last post, I looked at some of the ways in which dynamically typed languages can cause students to struggle with a number of examples in Python. I wanted to follow up on that by explicitly showing comparisons with what happens in those examples in a statically typed language…

My department is currently involved in a curriculum revision. We are looking at pretty much everything as part of this evaluation. One of the items is the programming languages we use for various courses, including our introductory courses. I am a strong proponent of statically typed languages for these courses…

TL;DR — In spring 2021 I did a job search and interviewed with Google, Facebook, and Amazon. I got offers from Facebook and Amazon and was in the team placement stage with Google when I accepted the Amazon offer. I recently went through the process of searching for a job…

The purpose of this blog post is to describe some of my experiences using Gather for teaching and related activities. The short version of this is that I think Gather is a great tool for educators and that it provides a much better experience than Zoom for many different activities…

I was just having a conversation with a student who was converting some code from C++ to Scala. She mentioned that she got through a lot of the conversion before remembering that Scala uses parentheses for indexing instead of brackets. She was complaining about the fact that this is different…