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HELP! Must choose language!

Karl A. Krueger kkrueger at example.edu
Mon Dec 30 16:46:44 EST 2002 
Nick Vargish <nav at adams.patriot.net> wrote:
> "Karl A. Krueger" <kkrueger at example.edu> writes:
>> I'd played with BASIC and Forth before high school age, but had Scheme
>> and Pascal in classes around that age. 
> I wish the CS teacher in my high school had introduced us to
> Scheme. That would have been great. As it was, I got so bored with
> Pascal that I taught myself FORTH. For a month I submitted all my
> class exercises in FORTH, until he begged me to stop... "I can see
> that your programs work, but I can't figure out _how_ they work."

It can be a little confusing.  I don't remember a word of it.

Forth and Scheme are interesting languages to compare, though, because
they are both "low syntax" languages, but in -completely- different
ways.  I think of Python as being a "medium syntax" language -- it's not
trivial, but it doesn't go out of its way to make you jump through hoops
(like Pascal) or to be clever (like Perl).


>> When I had Pascal the following year, the only real trouble was the
>> teacher's very sneaky trick questions, intended to teach careful
>> programming in a language that doesn't lend itself to same ...
> I got a 99% on the final, because apparently Wile E. Coyote did not
> invent the Pascal programming language. :^)

I think that was Wirth E. Coyote actually.

My first high school CS instructor was a great guy, albeit a very tricky
one -- he wanted to keep everyone on their toes.  He was mostly a math
teacher, actually, and has a book out on teaching math (with a little CS
thrown in):

	http://www.maa.org/pubs/books/tyb.html

He would invariably put in every problem set or test at least one trick
question, involving tricky function calls (okay, which parameters were
"var" this time?), variable scope ("crap, how many variables called "X"
does this program have?) and so forth -- the sort of things that one
hopes -never- to run into in reading someone else's code!


>> Boolean logic isn't in the usual American high-school math sequence,
>> which is a shame, but it's a better introduction to proofs than geometry
>> is, IMHO, since it is simpler:
> Good point. I didn't get boolean logic until I started taking
> Philosophy classes in college. That does say something sad about the
> curriculum of my high school, I guess (Singapore American School,
> early-mid 80s).

It's one of my pet peeves about the education system.  Boolean algebra
is a simple and useful thing that connects language and rhetoric to math
and computing ... and it is not taught to students who are supposed to
be learning language, rhetoric, math, or (often) computing.  I'm very
glad that I got it in an early CS course.


>> "A tuple is like an ordered pair in geometry." ...
> Thanks, I knew that. :^)

Sure, but the high schooler mightn't.  The quotes were "this is how to
explain it" ...


> "Learn Python, but it will spoil you for anything else you might be
> forced to use in the future..."

It makes a lot more sense than teaching a B&D language like Pascal or a
mess like C++ or Java.

-- 
Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger at example.edu>
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Email address is spamtrapped.  s/example/whoi/
"Outlook not so good." -- Magic 8-Ball Software Reviews
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