begin quoting Lan Barnes as of Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 04:03:07PM -0800: [snip] > I can remember when everyone coming out of UCSD had never had experience > with anything (editor, compiler, etc) outside of UCSD Pascal. Somebody > once made the criticism to me that Pascal obscured the machine from the > student, and I replied that UCSD Pascal obscured the Pascal from the > student.
It seems most students object to having to learn more than one language; if degrees in CS are "vocational training", that's because the students by and large resist learning about tools, additional languages, or anything that isn't of immediate use. Pico was an abomination not because it wasn't good at what it did, but that it kept a generation of students away from a programmer's editor. (I proctored a class once where it turned into "Lets write a program" using the projection capabilities of the classroom. I'm told that the class marvelled not at the problem, nor at the solution, nor at the elegance of the code we wrote, but at my facility with vi [which was not that great, compared to some I know] -- I guess most of 'em had considered the instructor's instructions to learn vi or emacs "stupid" and had gone with pico.) -Stewart "Just beat the leading edge of the CS-degree glut" Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
