Programming Paradigms in Computer Science Education

Main styles, or paradigms of programming – imperative, functional, logic, and object-oriented – are shortly described and compared, and corresponding programming techniques are outlined. Programming languages are classified in accordance with the main style and techniques supported. It is argued that profound education in computer science should include learning base programming techniques of all main programming paradigms.

Two-Language, Two-Paradigm Introductory Computing Curriculum Model and its Implementation

This paper analyzes difficulties with the introduction of object-oriented concepts in introductory computing education and then proposes a two-language, two-paradigm curriculum model that alleviates such difficulties. Our two-language, two-paradigm curriculum model begins with teaching imperative programming using Python programming language, continues with teaching object-oriented computing using Java, and concludes with teaching object-oriented data structures with Java.

JSONYA/FN: Functional Computation in JSON

Functional programming has a lot to offer to the developers of global Internet-centric applications, but is often applicable only to a small part of the system or requires major architectural changes. The data model used for functional computation is often simply considered a consequence of the chosen programming style, although inappropriate choice of such model can make integration with imperative parts much harder. In this paper we do the opposite: we start from a data model based on JSON and then derive the functional approach from it. We outline the identified principles and present Jsonya/fn — a low-level functional language that is defined in and operates with the selected data model. We use several Jsonya/fn implementations and the architecture of a recently developed application to show that our approach can improve interoperability and can achieve additional reuse of representations and operations at relatively low cost. ACM Computing Classification System (1998): D.3.2, D.3.4.