I guess I was whining.  While I'm at it, I'd like to note (whine) that very
few universities seem interested in, or capable of, teaching high
performance computing methodology.

--Doug

On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 10:55 PM, Owen Densmore <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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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>



-- 
Doug Roberts
[email protected]
[email protected]
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell
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