In grad school, I TAed a 2nd-year theory course many times that devoted about half the term to teaching specifications and invariants. Students always asked me why they were learning this. I told them to wait until they got to 3rd-year algorithms, then they'd see. - ThreadSky

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taylorjsmith.bsky.social • 40 days ago

In grad school, I TAed a 2nd-year theory course many times that devoted about half the term to teaching specifications and invariants. Students always asked me why they were learning this. I told them to wait until they got to 3rd-year algorithms, then they'd see.

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taylorjsmith.bsky.social•40 days ago

That quote from an article I read had me thinking why so few courses discuss invariants. It makes teaching algorithms much easier! I know of two examples: UWaterloo, where first-years must write contracts in their code, and the course I TAed at Queen's.

Article: https://matklad.github.io/2023/08/06/fantastic-learning-resources.html

timng.bsky.social•40 days ago

CS 135's contracts come from https://htdp.org/, so any course that's based on htdp will have them. One can extend this idea to actually enforce them. We used to do this by using the Typed Racket and turning contracts into actual type annotations.

timng.bsky.social•40 days ago

I've seen that U of T's CSC 110 takes this further and they do it in Python. They do type checking but they also have students write preconditions and invariants that are enforced by their autograders.

taylorjsmith.bsky.social•39 days ago

That’s interesting, I’ll have to dig into this some more and try it out for myself! (I was never involved first-hand with any courses at UWaterloo that used HtDP.)

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