Re: Fun with C

["Elias Salomão Helou Neto" <eshneto@gmail.com>]

On Apr 22, 6:21 am, "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mail...@dmitry-kazakov.de>
wrote:

> I think that all significant paradigms are already stated. All languages we
> are talking about are equivalent in terms of Turing completeness. Paradigms
> are of course finer than that, but still I believe that there is nothing
> significantly new left. All these agent-, aspect-, cloud-, extreme-,
> whatever stuff was known and used before 1980.

I must mention that it is always like that, people tend to believe
that every paradigm is already around until someone comes up with a
"new" one. But it may pretty well be the case that you're right and
they're all already stated, I guess there is just no way to know.

> Not every man or woman can program. I doubt that programming should be
> taught to people specializing on other majors. Sorry guys, programming is
> not a modern lingua franca.

Surely you're right. But still I have to teach my students...

> Nevertheless, future professional programmers should never be exposed to C
> as the first language. It is like teaching physics in the school. Pupils
> first learn the physics of XIX century. When they made 3/4, they are told:
> guys, that was wrong! Here is how it goes! Programmers must learn concepts
> and techniques which C cannot illustrate. What C can illustrate is how not
> to program.

When it comes to physics, the main reason to teach classical
mechanical is that it is actually a good approximation to modern
theories and the math is far more simple. Nobody will say "guys, that
was wrong!" because that is not wrong, it just must be used within its
valid limits. Rockets reached the moon based on computations that used
classical Newtonian mechanics.

It is quite different with programming languages, as C is actually
harder than Pascal, which is a great tool for teaching programming.

Only for the record, my current students are not supposed to become
professional programmers, but physicists. Not that it actually
matters, since those who should become professionals are exposed to C
as a first programming language as well in here.

> C is poor for teaching because it takes too much noise to illustrate basic
> programming concepts like array, string, result of a function etc. It is
> full of silly limitations, which programmers must learn to circumvent,
> before they get at the core ideas. In the end they learn only these tricks
> and think that programming is about that, lacking understanding of software
> engineering as a whole.

C is terrible for teaching, but it is not up to me to decide which
language to teach in those introductory classes.

Elias.