Assembly vs. Everything Else (was: SemiOT: Mourning for ClassicComputing)

On Sat, 18 Aug 2001, Derek Peschel wrote: I apologize. I was under the [apparently mistaken] impression that we were talking about beginners. That might be very interesting. In the 60s, it was commonplace to teach EAM (punch card devices), then machine language, then assembly language, then high level languages! I had been doing some EAM work and a little Fortran before I had my first course. After a semester of EAM, they let us do 1401 machine language (on a 1620 with an emulator!), then 1401 assembvly language, then Fortran (PDQ!), and Cobol. Now,... I tell my students to learn a high level language before taking [PC] Assembly language (that it is NOT the easiest way to learn what a program is, etc.) I start them off with trivial stuff using the 'A' command in DEBUG. Once they are writing programs that are long enough that it is annoying to have to insert a line, then I introduce them to the assembler (MASM 1.0 - 6.0, CHASM, A86, etc.) Starting in DEBUG is largely because of the excessive amount of overhead in MASM. I have them writing .COM files for most of the semester. In the C class, I let them use whatever compilers they own, but encourage them (non-subtly) to use Turbo-C (on the machines in the lab), in order to let them start writing programs WITHOUT spending the first half of the course on MAKE files, project files, etc. In every programming language, the FIRST assignment that I give is to write a program to put their name on the screen. It is not intended to teach them anything significant about algorithms, data structures, nor machine architecture. It is only to familiarize them with the tools. I knew one teacher whose first assignment involved a FOR loop. Her students were unable to coherently describe whether difficulties that they had were with the compliler or with their programming logic. Virtually none of her students made it to a second course. It is important to differentiate between how a student should be introduced to their first experience in programming v what they should be taught later. A number of years ago, UC Berkeley switched from using Pascal, to using Scheme (a Lisp derivative) for the first programming course for undergraduates. Soon after, they declared that they expected all of their students to already know C before their arrival! I once hired one of their graduates. I fired him a few weeks later. He was unable to write a trivial program to print 3-up mailing labels from a name/address data file, because he couldn't figure out any way to do 3-up labels without knowing how to make the printer return to the top of the page! -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com