[Info-vax] And another one bites the dust....

[John Dallman]

In article <sv0ah4$fuk$1 at panix2.panix.com>, kludge at panix.com (Scott
Dorsey) wrote:

> Academics shouldn't be teaching programming languages, they should 
> be teaching programming concepts.

However, getting those concepts thoroughly absorbed requires applying
them, which means writing and running programs in some actual language.
The trick there is to avoid your students getting the idea that the
language you use is any kind of One True Way. 

The way my course deal with that was to introduce new languages regularly.
It was a three-year course: in 1980-81, we did Pascal and an artificially
simplified low-level language, vaguely analogous to Knuth's MIX. In
1981-82, we did 8080 assembler, Algol68, FORTRAN and COBOL. In 1982-83,
we did whatever was required by the options we'd chosen: I did C and more
FORTRAN, and 6502 assembler as a hobby project. 

My first job required me to learn Coral66, which I'd mastered before the
course I was supposed to go on started - it's a very simple Algol subset.
The second job was 6502 assembler and later on, BCPL and C. Since then
Perl, shell scripts, domain-specific languages, more assembly languages,
LISP, a little Objective-C, and avoiding Java. 

John