9 May
2010
9 May
'10
2:58 a.m.
On 9 May 2010, at 00:02, cctalk-request at classiccmp.org wrote:
Message: 28
Date: Sat, 8 May 2010 15:12:25 +0100
From: "Andrew Burton" <aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Lisa C and Lisa FORTRAN
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Message-ID: <013701caef02$62da30c0$87fdf93e at user8459cef6fa>
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Fred Cisin" <cisin at xenosoft.com>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Friday, May 07, 2010 11:08 PM
Subject: RE: Lisa C and Lisa FORTRAN
Indeed.
I taught beginning FORTRAN in the 1980s at Merritt College (community
college), and would not mind doing it again, if we could get a quorum for
the classes.
COBOL is gone from our curriculum :-(
RPG is gone from our curriculum :-)
FORTRAN is gone from our curriculum :-(
APL is gone from our curriculum :-(
BASIC is gone from our curriculum :-(
The administration has cancelled C
The administration has cancelled C#
The administration has cancelled ASM
We are down to "Using Microsoft Office", "VISUAL BASIC",
and C++ (slated for cancellation soon)
The CIS departments are circling the drain.
That sucks. I am *so* glad I never went on to further education
after
secondary school. I have learnt more on my own (thanks to books, people on
this list and retro computers) than I ever would have in *modern courses*. A
piece of paper doesn't make me a good coder, good software written by me
does.
Fair enough but I am glad that I took a computer science degree (1971-74), though I must
say that some of the people on my course who got better grade degrees used to come to me
for advice when their programs did not work.
There is now a degrading of the term programming to include entering data on things like
an on board computer of a car to configuring spreadsheets and designing web pages.
How can BASIC not be taught? Every computer has
it's own version of BASIC,
Sorry I have to disagree there. There are MANY computers including modern ones which do
not support BASIC. If you restrict it to modern desktop and laptop machines then you are
probably correct but you are ignoring many pre 1980 machines and nearly all the embedded
computers like PIC chips.
A better choice would be C with the 1999 extensions. C++ is a good language but probably
not for beginners as it is to easy to write opaque programs which beginners seem to think
are good code because they are clever. As I hope all here would agree, a good program is
the simplest you can write to do the required task, and that will mean it is easy to
maintain (given adequate variable/function/method names and comments for the concepts you
woke up with in the middle of the night).
Or Pascal. I think almost any block structured language is better for beginners than
Basic.
whereas (as I understand it) Visual Basic is only
available for modern
computers.