3 Jan
2012
3 Jan
'12
5:43 a.m.
On Mon, 2 Jan 2012, Chuck Guzis wrote:
Before that, starting with machine language was a good
place to
start. Not assembly--machine language. Easy enough on decimal
machines--there were quite a few books on this for the IBM 1620.
In the 1960s, the college system that I'm now faculty in, did a
sequence of EAM, machine language (1401, emulated on a 1620), assembly
(141 SPS), HLL (PDQ FORTRAN on 1620). We had unfettered access to the
1620, and a tiny window into the room with the 1401.
But, I had already been doing FORTRAN (360), and then that sequence, and
then work using FORTRAN and APL (360s), before ever doing BASIC (TRS80)
and then C (5150), and THEN 8086 assembly.
If you've been exposed to machine langauge before
an HLL, I suspect
that you gain a deeper understanding of how langauges work.
MAYBE.
There are certainly some exceptions; different people learn differently.
Certainly many people learned much more effectively than I did. (I don't
remember ANYTHING about the 141 SPS class, but that could have been due
to the LSD to get the epiphanies to get through the calculus classes)
Can you teach calculus before arithmetic? (HLL =
calculus; Turing
machine = arithmetic).
"New Math" was an attempt to deal with theoretical math, WITHOUT it only
being as a followup to massive amounts of arithmentic.
I wonder how well it would have done with teachers who understood it?