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: 109fba,baaf5f793d03d420 X-Google-Attributes: gid109fba,public X-Google-Thread: 1014db,6154de2e240de72a X-Google-Attributes: gid1014db,public X-Google-Thread: fc89c,97188312486d4578 X-Google-Attributes: gidfc89c,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,97188312486d4578 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: "Tim Behrendsen" Subject: Re: What's the best language to start with? [was: Re: Should I learn C or Pascal?] Date: 1996/09/19 Message-ID: <01bba638$e913f800$87ee6fce@timpent.a-sis.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 183955169 references: <01bb8df1$2e19d420$87ee6fce@timpent.airshields.com> <515o3b$d7h@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> <01bb9fe6$7299d800$87ee6fce@timpent.a-sis.com> <51knkn$j61@dub-news-svc-8.compuserve.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: 1996-09-19T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: George wrote in article <51knkn$j61@dub-news-svc-8.compuserve.com>... > "Tim Behrendsen" wrote: > > > You prove my point that programmers take the procedural nature > > of the computer as so obvious as to be beneath discussion, but > > it's not. I cannot stress this enough: THIS MUST BE LEARNED BY > > STUDENTS. This is the primary, fundamental axiom of computers. > > > How many questions do we get in this newsgroup where a student > > simply didn't follow the flow of the program to see what happens? > > This is so obvious to you and I that we don't think about it, > > but *they didn't*! Because they have only a vague feeling of > > flow, and are still looking at the program as a kind of > > weird combination of a solid object and something with a flow > > of time. > > > Just to get away from the pointless symantic argument; are your really > suggesting that students don't understand something this basic. > If this is the effect of teaching OOA/OOP and similar mumbo jumbo, > then maybe it's time we got back to BASICs; no way they could they > fail to understand. > > What do they actually think happens inside a computer *magic*???? They don't think *anything*. Think about the fresh-faced newbie on his/her first day in CS 101. Their only experience with computers, if they have any at all, is interacting with them at the user level. They press a button, something happens. There's obviously a mechanism behind it, but they don't have any concept of how it works. Way back in the thread where this all started, one of the first points was my complaint about the huge number of graduates that come to me and are completely unable to take a problem that they have never seen before and generate a solution. I chalked this up to students being unable to "think like a programmer", and are only memorizing lists of algorithms that they can cough up on a test, but not really understanding them. > > Take recursion. How can you not understand recursion if you > > understand in your soul that computers execute a flow of > > instructions? You can't, and that's the point. Understanding > > the time axis is the key. > > They should never have been allowed to get this far without realizing > that. Well, I agree. Unfortunately, computer science today is not focused on thinking, it's focused on packing as many abstractions as possible into a student's head to protect them from the evils of "what's really going on." -- Tim Behrendsen (tim@a-sis.com)