> "We point out that programming teaching is useless for those who are bound to fail and pointless for those who are certain to succeed."
Maybe colleges would stop forcing people to take intro programming courses if they believed that and just skip to the more interesting language design courses.
There is a quote like this in the Feynman Lectures. It's nice for faculty to believe: takes the pressure off of us to teach. You're either born with it, or go away.
In physics, now, we know better. We can teach it. I'm sure they'll figure it out in programming, too.
When I was a grad student, we had group finals for calculus (i.e., standards uniform across all professors/TAs). We did not observe any statistically significant difference in grades between professors or (professor, TA) 2-tuples.
We were planning to use grades as a better way to evaluate teaching quality. When it didn't work, the professors (1) decided to go back to student evaluations rather than admit their job didn't matter.
(1) The people in charge of undergrad teaching were faculty not actively doing research, but who did have an interest in teaching well.
Maybe colleges would stop forcing people to take intro programming courses if they believed that and just skip to the more interesting language design courses.
Oh, and the pdf link: http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf