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

[Craig Franck <clfranck@worldnet.att.net>]

ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) wrote:
>"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.
>

Well, Tim will have to answer that last question, but I will say
that being a well educated, moral, civic minded person is far more 
important than having a good grasp of any programming language. It
is just that a discusion of assembler VS. HLL is far more topical 
for a comp. group, all other concerns not withstanding. :-)

-- 
Craig  
clfranck@worldnet.att.net 
Manchester, NH
"You see all around you people engaged in making others live
lives which are not their own, while they themselves care
nothing for their own real lives -- men who hate life though
they fear death". -- William Morris, "News from Nowhere" (1891)