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

[Scott Dorsey]

John Dallman <jgd at cix.co.uk> wrote:
>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. 

Amen!  
It's nice to have an algorithm description language to use for reference
but it's VERY important to let students know the algorithm description
language isn't necessarily even a usable programming language.

>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. 

Yes!  This is very specifically noted in the ACM standard curriculum.

When I was an undergrad, every class in the program seemed to be using a 
different language and a different operating system, and it was definitely
useful training to see how different systems did different things.  It's
still quite easy to expose students to a variety of programming languages
although much harder now to expose them to a variety of operating systems.

>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. 

Someday you'll need to write Java.  It's like the baby food version of C.
--scott
-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."