Re: What's the best language to start with? [was: Re: Should I learn C or Pascal?]

[Sam Harris <s_harris@hso.link.com>]

AJ Musgrove wrote:

> In the military, soldiers are taught how to disassemble guns.
> Why? There are people who could do that for them. If one FULLY understands the
> tools they are using, one can use them better. Period.

In the field, there is no one else to strip and clean your weapon.
In fact, while in garrison, a soldier is held ultimately responsible
for his weapon from time of issuance until it is returned to the
armoury and is expected to do all the cleaning and stripping
personally. No one else does it because the soldier must know
how to quickly disassemble and clear or even repair the weapon
in a dark, wet hole in no man's land.

In addition to those hard realities of military life, knowing those
intimate details of the workings of the weapon does indeed enable
the soldier to use it to better effect. Military specs on performance
envelops are always conservative. A knowledgeble soldier with the
weapon in the hand knows better how far the performance can be pushed.

As to language order, I learned BASIC and Z80 assembler at about
the same time (ages ago) and matured my techiques in both in parallel.
If someone cannot deal with the level of detail and the span of
attention required to effectively program assembly, then that
individual may be in the wrong business. Best to find out early
so the student can make an informed choice about their potential
success in the field.

When I was an Air ROTC cadet, I wanted to be a pilot. In that program,
you got 7 hours of flight instruction, 1 hour for solo, 3 hours of
additional instruction including more solos. The 12th hour was a
flight test. The candidate was expected to perform at the level of
40 hours of flight instruction. The reasoning being, if the candidate
did not have the talent to "pick it up" that quickly, then performance
would never be acceptable at the Air Force level. As a personal note,
after 7 hours, I was a competant pilot as long as everything went
a-okay, but I was no where near ready for the flight test. Like
Dirty Harry said, "A man's got to know his limitations."

I believe teaching a higher-level language with constant feedback
with the produced assembler output is a good combination worth
serious consideration and trial. In my college days tutoring other
comp-sci students, I noticed a disheartening trend of students
competent in reasoning with their familiar language becoming
totally lost in the minutia of assembly. They just count map
their higher-level language constructs into the dozens of lines
of equivalent assmbly code. Once I show them how those contructs
worked in assembly, they now had another "brand name" collection
to go with their tool set and of they went.

-- 
Samuel T. Harris, Senior Engineer
Hughes Training, Inc. - Houston Operations
2224 Bay Area Blvd. Houston, TX 77058-2099
"If you can make it, We can fake it!"