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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 2/21/2022 12:18 PM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
> =?UTF-8?Q?Arne_Vajh=c3=b8j?=  <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>> On 2/21/2022 10:19 AM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
>>> Academics shouldn't be teaching programming languages, they should be
>>> teaching programming concepts.  If you know C or Pascal, learning
>>> how to write the procedure division code in COBOL should be a matter
>>> of a couple hour's study.  Once you know the concepts, learning the
>>> syntax is easy.  (Frustrating, perhaps, because the COBOL syntax is
>>> so horrible, but easy.)
>>>
>>> So, I don't think there is any need to teach the programming part of
>>> COBOL in school.
>>
>> Learning the basic building blocks of variables, if, loops and
>> call are relative easy. Most people can learn that stuff.
> 
> You should try teaching Freshman programming to football players if you
> think this is easy.  There's a thing that happens in the head to turn
> on understanding of programming flow, and once it happens it becomes
> easy but getting it to happen to the uninitiated is sometimes hard.

It is 35 years since I taught Fortran and Pascal, but as I remembered
it then 75% of students in general and 99% of students that were good
at math could learn it.

>> There are more difficult topics. Some that I know cause a
>> lot of problems for people to grasp are:
>> - covariant and contravariant generic types
>> - currying and partially applied functions
>>
>> Note that those are not language specific either - they can
>> be shown in different languages - even though far from all
>> languages support them.
> 
> You bet!
> 
> It gets even more interesting when you talk about things like garbage
> collection and coroutines which are language features but rely on specific
> operating system features as well.  You can't talk about one without the
> other.  But you have to talk about them because they are important.

Coroutines is obviously tricky.

I think the "don't worry about deallocating memory - it will be done
for you" approach feels quite natural for many beginners.

Arne