I Introduction

1 Overview

1.1 What This Book is About

This book is an introduction to computer science. It will teach you to program, and do so in ways that are of practical value and importance. However, it will also go beyond programming to computer science, a rich, deep, fascinating, and beautiful intellectual discipline. You will learn many useful things that you can apply right away, but we will also show you some of what lies beneath and beyond.

Most of all, we want to give you ways of thinking about solving problems using computation. Some of these ways are technical methods, such as working from data and examples to construct solutions to problems. Others are scientific methods, such as ways of making sure that programs are reliable and do what they claim. Finally, some are social, thinking about the impacts that programs have on people.

1.2 The Values That Drive This Book

1.3 Our Perspective on Data

These concerns intersect with our belief about how computer science has evolved as a discipline. It is a truism that we live in a world awash with data, but what consequence does that have?

At a computational level, data have had a profound effect. Traditionally, the only way to make a program better was to improve the program directly, which often meant making it more complicated and impacting the values we discuss above. But there are classes of programs for which there is another method: simply give the same program more or better data, and the program can improve. These data-driven programs lie at the heart of many innovations we see around us.

In addition to this technical effect, data can have a profound pedagogic impact, too. Most introductory programming is plagued by artificial data that have no real meaning, interest, or consequence (and often, artificial problems to accompany them). With real data, learners can personalize their education, focusing on problems they find meaningful, enriching, or just plain fun—asking and answering questions they find worthwhile. Indeed, from this perspective, programs interrogate data: that is, programs are tools for answering questions. In turn, the emphasis on real data and real questions enables us to discuss the social impacts of computing.

These phenomena have given rise to whole new areas of study, typically called data science. However, typical data science curricula also have many limitations. They pay little attention to what we know about the difficulties of learning to program. They have little emphasis on software reliability. And they fail to recognize that their data are often quite limited in their structure. These limitations, where data science typically ends, are where computer science begins. In particular, the structure of data serve as a point of departure for thinking about and achieving some of the values above—performance, reliability, and predictability—using the many tools of computer science.

1.4 What Makes This Book Unique

Second, computing education talks a great deal about notional machines—abstractions of program behavior meant to help students understand how programs work—but few curricula actually use one. We take notional machines seriously, developing a sequence of them and weaving them through the curriculum. This ties to our belief that programs are not only objects that run, but also objects that we reason about.

Third, we weave content on socially-responsible computing into the text. Unlike other efforts that focus on exposing students to ethics or the pitfalls of technology in general, we aim to show students how the constructs and concepts that they are turning into code right now can lead to adverse impacts unless used with care. In keeping with our focus on testing and concrete examples, we introduce several topics by getting students to think about assumptions at the level of concrete data. This material is called out explicitly throughout the book.

Finally, this book is deeply informed by recent and ongoing research results. Our choices of material, order of presentation, programming methods, and more are driven by what we know from the research literature. In many cases, we ourselves are the ones doing the research, so the curriculum and research live in a symbiotic relationship. You can find our papers (some with each other, others not) on our respective pages.

1.5 Who This Book is For

This book is written primarily for students who are in the early stages of computing education at the tertiary level (college or university). However, many—especially the earlier—parts of it are also suitable for secondary education (in the USA, for instance, roughly grades 6–12, or ages 12–18). Indeed, we see a natural continuum between secondary and tertiary education, and think this book can serve as a useful bridge between the two.

1.6 The Structure of This Book

Unlike some other textbooks, this one does not follow a top-down narrative. Rather it has the flow of a conversation, with backtracking. We will often build up programs incrementally, just as a pair of programmers would. We will include mistakes, not because we don’t know better, but because this is the best way for you to learn. Including mistakes makes it impossible for you to read passively: you must instead engage with the material, because you can never be sure of the veracity of what you’re reading.

At the end, you’ll always get to the right answer. However, this non-linear path is more frustrating in the short term (you will often be tempted to say, “Just tell me the answer, already!”), and it makes the book a poor reference guide (you can’t open up to a random page and be sure what it says is correct). However, that feeling of frustration is the sensation of learning. We don’t know of a way around it.

We use visual formatting to higlight some of these points. Thus, in several places you will encounter this:

Exercise

This is an exercise. Do try it.

This is a traditional textbook exercise. It’s something you need to do on your own. If you’re using this book as part of a course, this may very well have been assigned as homework. In contrast, you will also find exercise-like questions that look like this:

Do Now!

There’s an activity here! Do you see it?

When you get to one of these, stop. Read, think, and formulate an answer before you proceed. You must do this because this is actually an exercise, but the answer is already in the book—most often in the text immediately following (i.e., in the part you’re reading right now)—or is something you can determine for yourself by running a program. If you just read on, you’ll see the answer without having thought about it (or not see it at all, if the instructions are to run a program), so you will get to neither (a) test your knowledge, nor (b) improve your intuitions. In other words, these are additional, explicit attempts to encourage active learning. Ultimately, however, we can only encourage it; it’s up to you to practice it.

Specific strategies for program design and development get highlighted in boxes that look like this:

Strategy: How to ...

here’s a summary of how to do something.

Finally, we also call out content on socially-responsible computing with visually distinctive regions like this:

Responsible Computing: Did you consider ...

Here are social pitfalls from using material naively.

1.7 Organization of the Material

This book contains four parts:

1. Foundations: A introduction to programming for beginners that teaches programming and rudimentary data analysis. It introduces core programming concepts through composing images and processing tables, before covering lists, trees, and writing reactive programs, all through a data-centric lens. The notional machine throughout this section is based on substitution.

2. Algorithms: Covers asymptotic complexity, recurrences, and fundamental graph algorithms.

3. Programming with State: Covers working with mutable variables and mutable structured data, building up to understanding (and working with) mutable lists and hashtables. This section transitions to Python. It extends testing to cover the nuances of programs with mutation. The notional machine in this section separate the naming environment (here called the directory) from a heap of structured data values.

4. Advanced Topics: Returns to algorithms topics that build on an understanding of state and stateful data structures.

These correspond, respectively, to CSCI 0111 and CSCI 0190 at Brown University. The course pages archive all prior instances of the courses, which include all the assignments and related materials. Readers are welcome to use these in their own courses.

Many of these courses will have entering students who have programmed with state before (in Python, Java, Scratch, or other languages). In our experience, most of these students have been given either vastly incomplete, or outright misleading, explanations of and metaphors for state (e.g., “a variable is a box”). Thus, they have a poor understanding of it beyond the absolute basics, especially when they get to important topics like aliasing. As a result, many of these students have found it both novel and insightful to properly understand how state really works through our notional machine. For that reason, we recommend going through that material slowly and carefully.

We of course invite readers to create their own mashups of the chapters within the sections. We would love to hear about others’ designs.

1.8 Our Programming Language Choice

If we wanted to get rich, we’d have written this book entirely in Python. As of this writing, Python is enjoying its instructional-use heyday (just like Java before it, C++ before that, C before that, Pascal earlier, and so on). And there are, indeed, many attractive aspects of Python, not least its presence next to bullet points on job listings. However, we’ve been repeatedly frustrated by Python as an entrypoint into learning programming.

As a result, this book features two programming languages. It starts with a language, called Pyret, that we designed to address our needs and frustrations. It has been expressly designed for the style of programming in this book, so the two can grow in harmony. It draws on Python, but also on many other excellent programming languages. Beginning programmers can therefore rest in the knowledge they are being cared for, while programmers with past acquaintance of the language menagerie, from serpents to dromedaries, should find Pyret familiar and comfortable.

Then, recognizing the value of Python both as a standard language of communication and for its extensive libraries, the Programming with State part of this book explicitly covers Python. Rather than starting from scratch in Python, we present a systematic and gradual transition to it from the earlier material. We believe this will make you learn general programming better than if you had seen only one programming language. However, we believe this will help you understand Python better, too: just like you learn to appreciate your own language, country, or culture better once you’ve stepped outside and been exposed to other ones.

2 Acknowledgments

This book has benefited from the attention of many.

Special thanks to the students at Brown University, who have been drafted into acting as a crucible for every iteration of this book. They have supported it with unusual grace, creating a welcoming and rewarding environment for pedagogic effort. Thanks also to our academic homes—Brown, Northeastern, and UC San Diego—for comfort and encouragement.

This book is completely dependent on Pyret, and thus on the many people who have created and sustained it.

We thank Matthew Butterick for his help with book styling (though the ultimate style is ours, so don’t blame him!).

Many, many years ago, Alejandro Schäffer introduced SK to the idea of nature as a fat-fingered typist. Alejandro’s fingerprints are over many parts of this book, even if he wouldn’t necessarily approve of what has come of his patient instruction.

We are deeply inspired by the work and ideas of Matthias Felleisen, Matthew Flatt, and Robby Findler. Matthias, in particular, inspired our ideas on program design. Even where we disagree, he continues to engage with and challenge our ideas in ways that force us to grow and improve. Our work is better than it would be in incalculable ways due to his influence.

The chapter on Interactive Games as Reactive Systems is translated from How to Design Worlds, and owes thanks to all the people acknowledged there.

This book is written in Scribble, the authoring tool of choice for the discerning programmer.

We thank cloudconvert for their free conversion tools.