On 19 Aug 2001, Iggy Drougge wrote:
> You mean you teach them Intel assembler?
Yes
Not because it's "good", but because it's needed. (I teach at a community
college, where we are teaching "useful" skills, not the abstractions of
the university.)
> When I took the programming course at the gymnasium, we were first taught
> scheme. A lot of people complained that it was a useless language, which in
> part is true, since it's hardly the kind of language you write a web browser
> in. But I thought it was a nice beginner's language (contrary to most of my
> co-students, I had programming experience, so my perspective differed from
> theirs). The syntax is extremely simple, I think Tony would like it. A lot of
> people superficially describe it as "a lot of parantheses", and that's true.
> There's not a lot of semicolons, three kinds of parantheses, hashes and the
> like.
I've been told that LISP stands for Lots of Insane Stupid Parentheses.
But could any language have punctuation more demented than C?
> OTOH, I also thought that it (and the teacher) encouraged some very dangerous
> programming techniques, such as recursivity.
Encouraged? Some of the teachers won't let their students do a program to
count to 10 WITHOUT recursion! They can't imagine doing something like
Fibonacci sequence WITHOUT using recursion. How can you do a non-trivial
program with recursion without stack overflow?
> But C at arrival? Well, if there are preparation courses, I can see why. There
> are a lot of people who have been using and programming computers since they
> were kids, and they have an initial advantage over the newcomers. So as not to
> bore the already-experienced, I can see why the real courses should start with
> such a prerequisite as long as there is a preparatory course for those not
> born with a joystick in their hand.
NOPE. NO preparatory course, nor stated prerequisite!
It's worse than that. The profs doing the intro course have decided on
Scheme, but the ones teaching the next course (Data Structures and
Algorithms teach that class using C. When challenged as to the
inconsistency, their response was, "well, they should already know how to
program in C before they get here." When you have a prof who writes
"puzzle code", like Alan Holub, undergrads are expected to follow stuff
like
while(*T++=*S++);
with NO formal preparation.
But the program there is over-enrolled. Their approach to that is to
progressively keep increasing the volume of homework until there are
enough breakdowns to get the enrollment down. I call that sadistic.
They call that "social Darwinism". If it were so, then they are breeding
for STAMINA, not computer science skill.
> Now it seems to be all about Java, though. =/
If it were to live up to its claims of portability, if it were to survive
MICROS~1's perversions of it, and if they would give me POINTERS (OK,
intrinsically non-portable),
then it could be a reasonable approach.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin_at_xenosoft.com
www.merritt.edu/~fcisin
Received on Sun Aug 19 2001 - 11:57:52 BST