Re: Fun with C

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Sun, 24 Apr 2011 07:27:10 -0400, Peter C. Chapin wrote:

> On Sat, 23 Apr 2011 23:36:36 +0200, "Dmitry A. Kazakov"
> <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote:
> 
>>Why would anybody consider the Earth round? Let us start teaching students
>>that the Earth is flat, after all it is a useful approximation for building
>>construction. Later you can tell them that it is not very flat...
> 
> It sounds like you think that's a bad thing.

Yes, is see no reason in teaching lies, even if lies are simpler than the
truth.

> In fact when constructing a building you don't take into account the
> curvature of the Earth. For example you don't use spherical trigonometry to
> lay out the foundation. Students learning about building construction
> certainly know (from elsewhere) that the Earth is not flat but they also
> don't want to hear about it in their course.

The question was in the order. First teach that the Earth is round and only
then say that the curvature is so small that it can be ignored for the case
at hand.

> You've said repeatedly that you are not a teacher and, frankly, it shows. I
> can tell you based on my 25 years of experience teaching that attempting to
> teach relativity and quantum mechanics, in any sort of significant way, to
> first year physics students would be a disaster. They don't have the
> mathematical background, for one thing, to handle it.

Really? I see no significant difference in their mathematics. Difference is
when functional, differential analysis, integration is needed. And it is
much too late to me anyway. The fundamentals of the relativity theory and
quantum mechanics should be taught in the school, before they get spoiled.

I am so certain about this because as a schoolboy I was exposed to an
experimental program which started mathematics right from the set theory
and used formalisms from the beginning. On the contrary physics was taught
traditionally "wrong". The program was soon scrapped, but I still remember
how much simpler it was comparing to physics, though I was little
interested in mathematics that time. My worst experience was later, when
reading a manual of physics "for advanced", which on 10 pages calculated
waves would be emitted by a moving electron using classical physics and no
differential analysis(!), just in order to state on the last page that all
this was just rubbish, the right way you learn later when attend high
school. This remains to me the epitaph of modern education.

> I think similar comments apply to programming education. That said, I do
> agree with one point that you've made: programming languages can be a
> distraction. I actually had a student recently suggest to me that we teach
> our first programming course using pseudo-code instead of C (we are a
> computer engineering program so C seems like the right first language). He
> said, "that way students could focus on organizing their program rather
> than on getting some strange code to compile."

Well, but pseudo-code itself is a distraction, a remnant of the procedural
paradigm mostly concentrating on the algorithm. It is not the way or at
least not the whole way the software is written now. Here I see the same
problem, education tries to follow the historical way of scholarship
instead of cutting dark corners.

> It would be an interesting experiment to try that, but I'm not sure it
> would help in the long run. In later courses I want them to write programs
> that compile and work so they will need to deal with that issue sooner or
> later. Which is easier to teach first? It's unclear.

I don't know. How about teaching them how to write a bug report and never
ever say "I did nothing, it worked yesterday"?

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de