Re: [tlug] Making programming easier... or something like that

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

I'm not Nigel, but I have taught programming a few times, and have to
advise students who haven't learned it very well frequently.

Attila Kinali writes:
 > On Mon, 22 Oct 2012 22:01:31 +0900
 > nigel barker <nigel@example.com> wrote:
 > 
 > This sounds interesting. How many years have you been teaching?

Two years (four sections) of programming.  In general, 28 years.

 > What did your early classes look like? How do you teach now?

50% lecture, 50% programming lab, target population 1st year social
science and management undergraduates.  The lab basically went
ungraded (no usable TA support), so evaluation was based on paper
tests.

 > What made pascal better than other programming languages in your opinion?

At that time (early 90s) the serious candidates were assembler, LISP,
FORTRAN, C, C++, and Java, and Pascal.  Assembler and FORTRAN were way
too low-level and none of the faculty were using them.  LISP was too
weird for my colleagues and I probably wouldn't use it in an
introduction because our introductory students need to learn
scripting, which is imperative programming.  I wouldn't want to teach
them bad habits in LISP. :-)  C, C++, and Java (especially the last)
are still quite low-level (pointer arithmetic), and require a lot of
arcane knowledge of libraries to get anything done (no built-in print
facility).  Behavior of many operators is hard to teach (`"a string"
== "a string"' may or may not be true depending on the implementation
of C).

That left Pascal.  Pascal was designed for teaching and for expressing
general algorithms (vs. FORTRAN which excels at numerical algorithms),
it's safe (doesn't give access to machine pointers), and the operators
are well-behaved.

 > Why doesn't this hold true these days?

Pascal has its problems.  One big one is that many students find
semicolon-as-separator hard to internalize.

 > What makes javascript more difficult than python?

Python was carefully designed around a number of specific principles
of language design.  Not everybody likes them, and they do slow
adoption into Python of useful ideas until Guido is happy with the
syntax used to express them.  But they do make for a very consistent
language.

OTOH Javascript is a creature of features, the features needed to
implement web services.  It's not bad, but its syntax is not as
consistent and elegant as Python.