SJS wrote:
begin quoting Christopher Smith as of Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 11:54:16AM -0800:
Tracy R Reed wrote:
I think they should have, at some point in time, used it -- so that when
it gets shown to them ten years into their career, they don't respond
with: "Oh, cool, that's nifty and new! Where can I use this?"
Yeah, this is true. Some day people will be required to take a history
of computing class because just like the history of nations and
societies "those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it".
I don't understand the confusion over pointers. I took the data
structures class, made linked lists. doubly linked lists, queues,
stacks, hash tables, etc. etc. It wasn't really a big deal.
What was your background going in to the data structures class? Two
years of Pascal, perhaps? Maybe a little C and shell-scripting? Possibly
some BASIC with the magic incantations PEEK and POKE?
No Pascal going into it. Although I wish I had had some Pascal. The
class itself was taught in Pascal IIRC. Learning programming was a real
pain for me growing up and looking back I feel I was rather
disadvantaged but I'm also thankful I had any experience at all. For
most of my young computer experience we lived out in the country outside
a small town. I didn't have access the BBS systems or computer
clubs/user groups or anything. Had to scrounge for whatever information
I could find.
When I was in Jr High I had an Apple IIc and learned BASIC. Not sure
whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. I did some trivial PEEK
and POKE stuff but never really understood what was going on with it. I
couldn't find any decent books on 6502 assembler. I did once come across
an assembly program that filled the screen with the letter "e" really
really fast. Yeay. Looking back on it the Apple was a pretty nice
platform because it came with BASIC in ROM and the ability to do
assembly in the ROM monitor and I think there was a simple debugger in
there. I did find out about a Pascal compiler for the IIc around 1988
but it cost hundreds of dollars which I could not afford.
Then in 1991 I got a PC. Again the only compilers I could find were
expensive. I got a pirated copy of a compiler called "Think C" from a
friend but as I had no books on C and didn't know a thing about it
couldn't make it do much. I was given a good assembly language book and
a copy of MASM at one point and had some fun with that. Although I
eventually got to the part of the book where we implemented a basic text
editor and mine had bugs which I was never able to resolve and that
ended there. It's hard to learn something like that with nobody to
bounce stuff off of. I was also offered a copy of "SCO UNIX" but it
required a hundred floppies and a new computer to install it on so I
passed on that. I wish I had found a way to take advantage of it now
that I know how cool UNIX is compared to DOS even though it was SCO.
By the time I got to SDSU I was actually sick of Windows and looking for
a copy of OS/2 but couldn't find one anywhere. I lamented this on IRC
which I had just discovered and someone told me about TAMU Linux. I went
looking for TAMU and found that it had just recently been discontinued.
While reading the Linux FAQ on rohan.sdsu.edu [EMAIL PROTECTED] sent
me a talk request. He noticed what I was doing in the process list and
offered to meet up with me and loan me his slackware floppies. The rest
is history. If I ever run into him again I owe him a beer.
By the time I got to the data structures class I had discovered Linux
and used it for a couple of years and had Internet access and so had
access to an embarrassment of programming riches.
When you teach a brilliant and motivated student, the choice of language
is probably entirely irrelevent. It's when you teach the average student
who's been told that they're stupid or dumb or not clever enough to program
a computer that the language chosen becomes significant. IMNSHO, of course.
Quite right. And I find that we are most likely to succeed when we do
not realize that we could fail. This is why I have hope for the OLPC
project. A lot of these kids don't know anything about computers and
will have no prejudices about learning them.
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