in defense of Pascal

[Bob Sneidar]

Well one overlooked advantage to teaching a hard language out of the  
gate is to weed out the wannabe's. A lot of kids would love to be  
programmers, until they see how much work and time it takes to get  
very good at it. Only those gifted ought to go on to be the  
programmers of the future, and as I don't trust the unknown teachers  
and administrators of any school system to make that judgement for the  
students, teaching them a root language lie Pascal is a great  
deterrent to "lazy programmers" (the existence in numbers of which I  
deduce to be prevalent by seeing the kind of software that comes out  
of some places these days.)

Bob Sneidar
IT Manager
Logos Management
Calvary Chapel CM

On Jun 25, 2009, at 6:29 PM, Sadhunathan Nadesan wrote:

>>
>> Here in Plovdiv they teach High School kids PASCAL, which is,  
>> unless you
>> are some sort of retro-geek, a major turn-off. I shall, very shortly,
>> become a "pusher" for RR, and be trotting round the school giving  
>> demos
>> of just what can be done.
>
>
> Alternate point of view:
>
> I love Pascal.  Just like those high school kids, it was the first
> language I was taught.  It enforces excellent habits such as strong  
> typing
> which then carry over into other languages.  Great teaching language,
> and if you study the work of Nickolas Wirth, such as "Algorithms +
> Data Structures = Programs"
<snip>