Curricula (was: Assembly vs. Everything Else

From: Fred Cisin <cisin_at_xenosoft.com>
Date: Sun Aug 19 18:23:20 2001

> > But could any language have punctuation more demented than C?

On Sun, 19 Aug 2001, Sellam Ismail wrote:
> C's punctuation is simple and logical:
> -Semicolons . . .
> That's it
That's a good explanation of C's use of semi-colons.
But it gets messier when you explain some of the context sensitive
characters, such as & or *. In order to avoid the character set
availability problems that plagued APL, they used digraphs, such as "/*",
and had some characters having MANY different meanings, depending on
context.


> I think "for" loops in C are semantically bunk, but they work, and you can
> do some interesting things with them.

I usually introduce the "for" statement after doing "while" for a while,
and explain what "for" does in terms of the equivalent "while" loop.


> > But the program there [(UC Berkeley)] 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.
> Good point.

They (UCBerkeley) have also done things such as having a calculus
prerequisite in courses that do NOT use any calculus. For the sole
purpose of reducing by irrelevant criteria how many people can take the
course.

Because of the IRRELEVANT calculus prerequisite (there are some other
courses where it could make sense), they won't accept for transfer courses
from other schools that are IDENTICAL other than not having a calculus
prerequisite.


UCBerkeley has some GREAT graduate projects. But I don't think that they
are a credible example for how to introduce people to computers. Their
lower division undergrad CS is way too flawed.

--
Grumpy Ol' Fred        cisin_at_xenosoft.com
Received on Sun Aug 19 2001 - 18:23:20 BST

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