New Programming Paradigms

This chapter examines how changes in prevailing programming paradigms necessitate a fundamental reexamination of what we teach novice programmers and how we go about teaching them. Classical approaches to computation were linear, deterministic, explicitly human-constructed, and local; these properties were well-matched to computing education that emphasized skills like creating algorithms and data structures, and reasoning about sequential execution. However, already widespread or emerging computing paradigms such as machine learning, distributed systems, and quantum computing indicate a need to shift computing education away from the traditional epistemology of computing in computing education. Furthermore, the ubiquity of computing applications in daily life motivates a growth in the curriculum beyond a focus on learning specific skills and facts decoupled from real world applications, towards a utilitarian approach that has students learn computing through the process of building personally meaningful computing artifacts. We exemplify this shift through examples of how these new paradigms can fit within current educational settings.