Algorithms for Newbies: Static or Dynamic?

A talk I just went too (by Lynn Stein) raised the following question for me.

While I have some strange ideas about how an algorithms class should be taught (like students should do some programming in an algorithms class), in most ways my algorithms class is quite traditional. Roughly, my class looks quite similar in the path it takes to Algorithm Design by Kleinberg/Tardos (or the corresponding subsections of the standard Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein). And specifically, I teach primarily what we'd call "static" algorithms; there's an input, a desired output, and the algorithm is the recipe.

These days, many of us do research in and arguably most commercial products use "dynamic" algorithms; that is, they're processes that are always on, reacting to the environment around them. (Your cell phone, for example, might be considered a dynamic algorithm device; so would a robot vehicle. If you like, you can think of "dynamic algorithms" as roughly being closely tied to "distributed systems".) My course is not geared to teach or have student explore dynamic algorithms, although they get brief mention. Lynn seemed to be suggesting that dynamic algorithms and programs should be taught before static algorithms and programs. It is, after all, the paradigm students are most familiar with, and arguably more interesting to them.

This doesn't sit right with me. In my mind, it's partly a "walk before you can run" issue -- you could teach a lot of calculus without teaching trig, but it doesn't seem the right way to go. Although that's not really quite the right analogy; I can see that the issues in dynamic algorithms/distributed systems -- like communication, and responding to asynchronous incoming signals -- are often quite different than for static algorithms, so much so that in many case you don't have to know your standard static algorithms to write a dynamic one. I think it's more that I think that to do anything that I would consider technically interesting you need to know static algorithms first. That is, sure you can probably teach people to write an interactive Internet chat program pretty easily, and they'd learn a lot by doing it, but that's like the task 20 years ago of writing a checkbook program, just harder because of issues raised by the interactivity. To do really interesting things with dynamic algorithms, my bias is you need good static algorithms behind it. Like Google mail's search features, or Amazon's recommendation feature, or other stuff. (Or at least, in many cases, you should understand the static version of an algorithm before trying to understand the dynamic version of it.)

So now I'm wondering if I'm just old-fashioned. What do you all think?