Dave Riley wrote:
I shudder at the fact that many of our high schools
use Java as an introductory language. I really can't see the point of starting someone
out saying, "Your program runs from a special method in a special class (we'll
teach you what both of those are later) labelled 'public static void main()'.
Just wave the chicken correctly, and maybe if you stick with it long enough,
you'll find out what that magic incantation means."
Well put. Alas that was the situation I was facing in University, where Java was a
compulsory assignment for all EE students (and thus probably their first encounter with
programming for some of them).
I had hitherto only dabbled in various BASIC dialects (CBM, Borland Turbo, and Visual
BASIC) - and NO, I don't feel like a brain-crippled Zombie! - but had read my share
of C code too, so one of the instructors asked me whether I was a C coder - but probably
just because I had picked up that style of abbreviated, mixed-case procedure and variable
naming...
That however only came later, when I took a course "Systems programming in C".
There at last, some really useful education about things like I/O, queues and scheduling
(however *n*x-centric) started to happen - but that course was primarily targeted at
grammar / high school level *teachers*! I was just barely allowed to take an oral exam and
turn in the earned credits (an A-) for my diploma on a special agreement basis.
A while later, I also got some exposure to FORTH when I started hacking around on Sun
workstations, like modifying their boot net routines (to get away from the RARP
requirement that some OBP revisions imposed) and adding support for nonstandard frame
buffer resolutions.
(BTW, anybody here been into the cgthree ASIC deep enough to tell me whether it can do
interlacing and if so, how to frob it to?)
I did also got to write some assembly for an AVR microcontroller in my pre-diploma
thesis.
Arno Kletzander
...sent from my HTC Magician PDA