20 Aug
2001
20 Aug
'01
1:43 p.m.
XenoSoft skrev:
On 19 Aug 2001, Iggy Drougge wrote:
I didn't know Intel was needed. If that is the case, it must be the fault of
community colleges (whatever that is).
I just love it when people just use what they're familiar with, instead of
actually investigating the alternatives. That's one reason why computing is so
tedious today.
You mean you teach them Intel assembler?
Yes
Not because it's "good", but because it's needed. (I teach at a
community
college, where we are teaching "useful" skills, not the abstractions of
the university.) > When I took the programming course at the
gymnasium, we were first taught
> scheme. A lot of people complained that it was a useless language, which in
> part is true, since it's hardly the kind of language you write a web
> browser in. But I thought it was a nice beginner's language (contrary to
> most of my co-students, I had programming experience, so my perspective
> differed from theirs). The syntax is extremely simple, I think Tony would
> like it. A lot of people superficially describe it as "a lot of
> parantheses", and that's true. There's not a lot of semicolons, three
kinds
> of parantheses, hashes and the like.
I've been told that LISP stands for Lots of Insane
Stupid Parentheses.
But could any language have punctuation more demented than C?
Well, there are those languages my mates love to read about, the ones designed
just to annoy, using two-dimensional flow control, roman numerals, trinary
notation, comefroms, and so on. =)
> 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?
Which I also demonstrated to the teacher. =)
> 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.
I think they're not as choosy here. I've got a neighbour who's taking
datalogy
with no previous computer experience worth mentioning, and there are courses
at the royal institute of technology for retraining us useless humanists into
useful scientists and programmers, as well as particular girls' classes.
> 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.
I don't think I've ever met anyone who dislikes it, but I've never bothered
to
learn it (useless language on any of my computers), and I've enever bothered
with C++ for the same reasons (Friends tell me it's very slow and bloated).
I've never really understood the concept of OOP, either. =)
Why are pointers non-portable, though? C uses pointers and is very portable.
--
En ligne avec Thor 2.6a.
"Wer nichts zu sagen hat, sagt es auf Englisch."
(-Walter Kr?mer, bez?gl. Anglizismen.)