Treffer: Experiences Teaching Data Structures With Java

This paper describes our experiences incorporating Java in a Data Structures course. We describe the features of Java that made for a more interesting course, the difficulties that we encountered, and compare Java to the prior languages used in this course, Ada and C++. All in all, we found Java to be a reasonable, but not overwhelming better, alternative. Our students were particularly happy with the experiment. Introduction Among Computer Science educators, hardly any topic inspires more heated debate than the choice of programming language in the introductory sequence. In the late 80s, the uniformly accepted choice was Pascal, but since then, a host of alternatives have come into use. C++ seems to have emerged as the winner, while Pascal, C, Ada, Scheme, and Modula-3 split most of the remaining market. There appear to be two overriding reasons for C++'s emergence. First, principles such as encapsulation and information hiding, that are important to teach in the CS I/II curriculum.