Re: Beginner's Language?

[dvdeug@x8b4e53cd.dhcp.okstate.edu (David Starner)]

On Wed, 09 May 2001 18:01:10 -0500, Sashank Varma <sashank.varma@vanderbilt.edu> wrote:
> can you provide some evidence that:
> 
> (1) any standard general-purpose programming languages resemble natural
>     language at all, that there is some metric of natural language-ness
>     by which they can be ordered, and that wirth-style languages score
>     higer on this metric than lisp?
>
> (2) the degree to which a programming language resembles natural
>     language predicts the ease with which it will be learned?

Tell me what
	!bbz#,^az@bz,
does.

Then tell me what
	
	OPEN FILE ARGUMENT 2 AS 2
	BEGIN LOOP
		LOAD FILE ARGUMENT 1 INTO BUFFER
		COPY BUFFER TO 2
	FINISH LOOP
does. 

If I came upon the first, I would give up. The second, anyone can
probably get some idea of basically what it's doing. For a new 
student, knowing that they aren't totally lost can be a huge
confidence builder.

As for lisp itself, just from the name, what does defun or cadar
do? What do FUNCTION, PROCEDURE and BEGIN do? I've seen 2 + 2 since
the first days of school. Why (+ 2 2)? Learning a new vocabulary,
a new equation syntax is not what you want to be teaching when you
have so much else to teach.

> (if you thinking i'm picking nits, note that i've granted you the
> implicit assumption that there is a singular quality shared by all
> natural languages, a chomsky-esque universal grammar perhaps, that i
> could have also questioned.)

That's a theoritical assumption. How about "The vast majority of the
people who are going to be learning computer programming know an 
Indo-European language, Russian, Chinese or Japanese."

> there are many formal notations, and while one pressure on the form
> of notations may be resemblance to natural language, there are others
> of greater importance (e.g., minimizing the difficulty of performing
> certain operations).  

No, that's not of greater importance. It is, in fact, irrelevant for
any reasonable language. The goal is teaching people to program,
not helping experianced programmers hack up scripts or researchers
write up quicker chess programs. If something is difficult in your
chosen language, you put that off until a latter class, possibly
even in a more suitable language. 

-- 
David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org
Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org
"I don't care if Bill personally has my name and reads my email and 
laughs at me. In fact, I'd be rather honored." - Joseph_Greg