in defense of Pascal

Richmond Mathewson richmondmathewson at gmail.com
Fri Jul 10 12:37:04 EDT 2009


Bob Sneidar wrote:
> Well one overlooked advantage to teaching a hard language out of the 
> gate is to weed out the wannabe's.
Not any longer; in our politically correct, all-inclusive times we have 
to say thet 'Epsilon semi-morons' "code differently"
(err, or like Steve Jobs, we might say "code different" - and we aren't 
even allowed to point out that Steve Jobs suffers
from bad grammar) and give them jobs, rather than being what my sister 
calls a "horrible elitist" and weed them out.

> 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. 
Yup!
> 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"
What? Me? Surely not? . . . :)

Of course, if one wanted to be "nasty", one could point out that the 
marvellous thing about Runtime Revolution,
unlike PASCAL, BASIC, FORTRAN and so forth, is that it can cater to lazy 
programmers (who, admittedly, will
only produce lazy programs) as well as the elite.

Of course there are 2 schools of thought here:

1. John has 2 left feet so we won't even let him near the ball.

2. John has 2 left feet but let's let him near the ball; you never know, 
his feet may yet sort themselves out.

I adhere to something halfway between these 2 stances: just now working 
with an 11 year-old girl who
suffers from a terrible lack of confidence: she's now programming, after 
a fashion, with RR; if she gets
to the stage where she can do things independently, I'll give her all 
the encouragement I can; if,
however, she "dries up" that will be the end. I'll give her 5 weeks to 
go one way or the other.

Some silly people here told me "Oh, she's tied up in knots and can't do 
anything at all." Not Good At All;
give the poor wee thing a chance!

Mind you, if I'd shoved PASCAL at her she would have shrivelled up and 
died there on the spot.
> (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>
>
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