The number of Google search results for the phrase "choosing the first programming language" at the time of writing is 15,800. This illustrates just how debated the issue of choosing the first programming language is. In this blog post, I will not actually try to answer the question posed in the title of the post. I will not discuss what language we should teach as the first one. Instead, I will look at a more interesting question. I will investigate the arguments that are used in favour of or against part[...]

When I joined the School of Computing at the University of Kent, I was asked what subjects I wanted to teach. One of the topics I chose was Software Engineering. I spent quite a lot of time reading about the history of software engineering when working on my paper on programming errors and I go to a fair number of professional programming conferences, so I thought I can come up with a good way of teaching it! Yet, I was not quite sure how to go about it or even what software engineering actually means. In [...]

I've been teaching F# for over seven years now, both in the public F# FastTrack course that we run at SkillsMatter in London and in various custom trainings for private companies. Every time I teach the F# FastTrack course, I modify the material in one way or another. I wrote about some of this interesting history last year in an fsharpWorks article. The course now has a stable half-day introduction to the language and a stable focus on the ideas behind functional-first programming, but there are always ne[...]

In May, I joined the School of Computing at the University of Kent as a Lecturer (equivalent of Assistant Professor in some other countries). When applying for the job, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to best explain the kind of research that I would like to do. This blog post is a brief summary of my ideas. I'm interested in way too many things, including philosophy and design and data journalism, but this post will be mainly about programming language research. After all, I'm a member of the Pro[...]

Unless you are a sci-fi author or some secret government agency, the question whether aliens would understand lambda calculus is probably not your main practical concern. However, the question is intriguing because it nicely vividly formulates a fundamental question about our formal mathematical knowledge. Are mathematical theories and results about them invented, i.e. constructed by humans, or discovered, i.e. are they eternal truths that exist regardless of whether there are humans to know them? The que[...]