begin quoting Tracy R Reed as of Wed, Jan 16, 2008 at 09:56:55AM -0800: > SJS 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 think we should start now. There are people who honestly think (or maybe they're just very good at winding me up) that MS "invented" the concept of an operating system. . . > >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. This was CS310 at SDSU? What language was CS107 and CS108 taught in at the time? In 1992, CS107 was in Pascal. You couldn't take CS310 (data structures) until you had 107 and 108, and even then, much of the class was taught with psuedocode, depending on the instructor. > 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. I didn't find out about the BBS world until my sophmore year in college. I didn't have a computer "of my own" until I was a freshman, and then I mostly used it for papers and games, and went downstairs to the computer lab for access to the school accounts. > When I was in Jr High I had an Apple IIc and learned BASIC. Not sure Heh. You had a head start on me there. I was in high school when my family got a Vic20... I checked out computer magazines from the library and laboriously transcribed the BASIC programs so I could run them for so long as the computer was powered up. > 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. I think the small 6502-based computers were a great introduction; I wish we had something more like for kids these days. Start 'em off with something they're bound to outgrow. I wonder if this isn't the root of the problem... how many kids these days ever *see* a computer as a box that follows instructions, rather than as a box one "has an experience with"? (Wow, almost on topic!) > 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. That's C. :) > 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. Wah. > 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. I had access to a Xenix computer for awhile. It wasn't as nice as the minicomputer OSes. > 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. Heh. I had a copy, but my computer was too gutless to run it decently. A friend of mine had a screaming new machine, and it was slick on *his* machine... > 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. Heh. I remember downloading a couple of floppies at a time to my account, then going in with floppy disks, burning the disk, and then downloading the next couple of slackware floppies. I still have 'em.... wonder if they're any good. > 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. Linux offered up lots of choices. > >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. They'll develop their own set of prejudices. We'll see how it works out. -- All the world is exactly like what I am used to And my prejudices shape the world like elmer's glue. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
