Curricula (was: Assembly vs. Everything Else

From: Richard Erlacher <edick_at_idcomm.com>
Date: Sun Aug 19 19:23:59 2001

see inline comments, plz.

Dick

----- Original Message -----
From: "Fred Cisin (XenoSoft)" <cisin_at_xenosoft.com>
To: "XenoSoft" <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Sunday, August 19, 2001 10:57 AM
Subject: Curricula (was: Assembly vs. Everything Else

> I've been told that LISP stands for Lots of Insane Stupid Parentheses.
> But could any language have punctuation more demented than C?
>

I learned it as "Lots of Irritating Single Parentheses" although words like
"inane" and "stinking" have crept in there as well.

Dick

>
> > 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 - 19:23:59 BST