From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: *** X-Spam-Status: No, score=3.8 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID, RATWARE_MS_HASH,RATWARE_OUTLOOK_NONAME autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: fc89c,97188312486d4578 X-Google-Attributes: gidfc89c,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,97188312486d4578 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: 1014db,6154de2e240de72a X-Google-Attributes: gid1014db,public X-Google-Thread: 109fba,baaf5f793d03d420 X-Google-Attributes: gid109fba,public From: "Tim Behrendsen" Subject: Re: What's the best language to start with? [was: Re: Should I learn C or Pascal?] Date: 1996/08/14 Message-ID: <01bb89f2$de94b840$87ee6fce@timpent.airshields.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 174143628 references: <31FBC584.4188@ivic.qc.ca> <01bb8854$c2f6b880$87ee6fce@timpent.airshields.com> <32 <01bb8923$e1d34280$87ee6fce@timpent.airshields.com> <4urn70$dhi@solutions.solon.com> content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 organization: A-SIS mime-version: 1.0 newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.unix.programmer,comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-08-14T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Peter Seebach wrote in article <4urn70$dhi@solutions.solon.com>... > In article <01bb8923$e1d34280$87ee6fce@timpent.airshields.com>, > Tim Behrendsen wrote: > >We have the world that you want. This is CS curriculum today; are > >you happy with the level of expertise of the graduates? I'm not, > >based on my experience with trying to hire them. If you're not > >either, what do you think the reason is? > > I don't know for sure what a CS curriculum is today. If it's anything like > psych, the first problem is that students aren't taking enough philosophy and > math classes, and aren't learning basic analytic skills like decomposition. > If you can't take a problem and break it down into parts, you can't do > anything. > > I don't see assembly as a better model than English for learning this. I see > the problem as being a tendancy to focus on concrete problem solving in any > number of languages, and no real study to the art that unifies the languages. > A programmer taught in such a curriculum knows some languages and not others, > but would need a class to learn any new language. This is probably not ideal. I think this is learning bias on your part; you appear to learn more from an abstract, theoretical basis rather than a "sit down and try it out" basis. I would say the latter is more typical when learning computers than the former. But I agree with you; "the art that unifies the languages". I think this is what I mean when I say "learning to think like a programmer". The question is, how to convey this? It just seems to me that the more "pure" and undistracted you can make it, the better. -- Tim Behrendsen (tim@airshields.com)