Well, lets start the usual friam whining. Hey, you left out foobar++! But to
be fair, I'd be fine if you replaced java with c/c++.
The point, obviously, is to give a span of languages that hit the main points.
-- Owen
On Jul 31, 2010, at 5:15 PM, Douglas Roberts wrote:
> I guess you're not interested in teaching languages appropriate to HPC
> implementations, Owen. C++ and MPI...
>
> --Doug
>
> On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 4:47 PM, Owen Densmore <[email protected]> wrote:
> Given the constraints and goals, my approach would be to teach that there are
> many languages in different environments, but that they share many features
> (loops, conditionals, types, ...).
>
> Then I'd pick the following areas:
> Command-line programming: Bash & Python
> File/Text manipulation, ssh login, regular expressions, commands
> System Programming: Java
> objects, GUI, Applets, types
> Web Server Programming: PHP
> client - server networking architecture, http requests, how it won over
> java
> Web Client Programming: Javascript
> DOM, AJAX, html, css
>
> That may look like a lot, but it covers most programming environments and
> goals. And the design issues would pop out when discussing the environments
> in which these languages excel.
>
> I would NOT go into a lot of detail (clearly!). Instead I'd generalize what
> they have in common, and possibly use cheat-sheets which have 80% of the
> important syntax.
>
> The bash/python initial work would also have a lot of pragmatic elements: how
> to login and use a remote unix box (bash), and the historic evolution of awk,
> perl, and now for many, python. I'd note that python does not have a native
> gui (but is considered the best "pseudo-code" by theoreticians -- see
> sagemath.org) thus the transition to java would have even more meaning. The
> two web languages would clarify the tcp/ip world we live in and most do not
> understand.
>
> The goal is to leave the students with a language framework from which they
> can choose how to proceed in future work.
>
> -- Owen
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