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

[ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)]

"Tim Behrendsen" <tim@airshields.com> writes:

>Uh, the people who coded in assembly -- AND CHECKED THE COMPILER
>OUTPUT -- produced programs that were bigger and slower?

Yes, the report says that the people who were thinking in assembly
terms (but writing IMP) and checked the compiler output DID produce
bigger slower programs than the people who were thinking in high
level (well, PL/I-ish) terms.

>I think that there were other factors involved other than just
>"assembly vs HLL" style learning.

This was a project at one of the top computer departments in one of the
top Universities in Britain, and they were desperately keen to get
working software.  In fact, when UNIX V7 first started to become popular,
IMP had been ported to more machines than C (including 16bit, 32-bit,
36-bit, and 48-bit ones) and EMAS had been ported to more machines than
UNIX.  When the University of Kent ditched ICL's operating system for
the ICL 2900 and adopted EMAS, they wanted and got an *increase* in
performance and reliability.

When I met EMAS, in 1980, it was running on ICL 2900s and serving a
large undergraduate population.  At the time I sneered at it because
it wasn't UNIX, but dynamic loading, memory mapped files, archiving,
and a bunch of other things were there and darned solid.

In short, I think you will find that the people the report was talking
about were good experienced 70s-style programmers.

>Again, I have to go back to the fact that *we have the world
>that you want*.  And it doesn't work.

You don't even BEGIN to know what world I want.
I can tell you for certain sure that we don't even begin to approach
hailing distance of the shadow of the world I want.
To start with, I would like students at entry

 - to have a really thorough grasp of their native language
   (I could count the number of 1st year students here who can tell me
    the difference between a count noun and a mass noun on the fingers
    of one ear)

 - to have an adequate grasp of English if that is not their native language

 - to take *pleasure* in reading

 - to be able to use the index in a book

 - to be able to write a short essay on a topic that interests them

 - to have a reasonable grasp of the elements of algebra and calculus
   (I learned calculus from "Teach Yourself Calculus"; a *great* little book)
   [I *know* what the high-school curriculum has in this state; I'd take
   that and say thank you but that the students don't actually -know- it]

 - to have a reasonable grasp of the really elementary points about statistics;
   I don't care if they know what a standard deviation is, but I _do_ wish
   they understood that in the presence of variation one measurement tells
   you very little
   [again, the Victorian high school currculum has everything I want and
   more; it is or was a good curriculum]

 - to have some grasp of reasoning; ideally the notion of formal proof,
   but at the very least the idea that a plausible argument might be wrong
   [there is some very good material produced for schools these days.]

 - to be able to play at least one musical instrument (including the human
   voice and drums as musical instruments) or knit or crochet or weave;
   what I have in mind here is enjoyable "humane" or "arts" activities
   that concern quasi-periodic patterns with a notation that you learn
   to read, so that you learn to take pleasure in reading things that
   are not text, but are still in some sense "stories".

I'm sorry, but it is FARCICAL to argue about whether students should learn
assembly code early on or not when I get students who cannot divide
1000 by 10 without a calculator (this really happened) and cannot spell
their own name (this happened too).  And we don't get the worst university
entrants here either, far from it.

In the world I want, it would be impossible to stop students learning
about assembly code anyway; they would be willing and able to pick it
up from a book.  In the world I want, it would not be dangerous to
teach students about assembly early on, because they would have already
caught the ideas of patterns and transformations and reasoning.  I wrote
my first (IBM/360) assembly code program while still at high school; but
I had learned matrix algebra before that, so it did me no harm.

Prioritising the thousand things we need to teach, to students
 - who find reading and writing English difficult and unpleasant
 - who loathe and dread mathematics and anything that looks like it
 - who are much more interested in producing flashy GUIs than in having
   a working algorithm for the U to I with
 - who cannot listen and take notes at the same time (preprinted lecture
   notes are now being demanded as a right)
 - ah, you get the idea
is not easy.  

Tim Behrendsen, if you think assembler is more urgent than remedial
English and elementary mathematics, we shall just have to disagree.

-- 
Australian citizen since 14 August 1996.  *Now* I can vote the xxxs out!
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/%7Eok; RMIT Comp.Sci.