On 7 Apr 2009, at 5:52 pm, Russel Winder wrote:
On Mon, 2009-04-06 at 12:32 +0100, Enda Dunican wrote:
Yes I agree with this last email. If there was an ideal language out
there everybody would be using it. Be prepared to be browbeaten from
the soapbox when you start a topic like this.
Or i
Russel Winder writes:
>As a way of killing what could have been an interesting thread, potentially
>full of people's experiences and reasons for choices, and not involving too
>much prejudice and advocacy research, this appears to have been very
>successful.
As a way of pointing out that this ex
Hi. I have been casually watching this discussion but feel that my recently
completed thesis might be of interest to some particularly those thinking of
mental models and conceptions of a program.
As I am not in an academic position at present, I am not able to take my
work to what I see as the
That's an interesting point. As practitioners we spend almost all of
our time looking at stuff that doesn't work because we haven't
finished or it's broken.
That said, I disagree that the language doesn't matter. C++ is just
too complicated, most "professionals" I know choose to ignore half
>> One is obviously mathematics, especially since lecturers do like
>> mathematical examples for programming.
>
> I don't know if I agree on this. If mathematics is a good preparation for
> programming class it should be because it teaches student "how to think" not
> because the teacher happens to
On 09-04-07 at 12.44, Gergely Buday wrote:
One is obviously mathematics, especially since lecturers do like
mathematical examples for programming.
I don't know if I agree on this. If mathematics is a good
preparation for programming class it should be because it
teaches student "how to thin
Thanks for the comment, Walter.
My words in the previous message were, as usual,
inaccurate. I should have said that it is important
that a student knows how a computer works in a
LOGICAL sense. This means, for example, that everything is stored
as binary numbers in the registe
Dear PPIGers,
the recent thread is about which language to choose for an
introductory programming course. I have another question which is
closer to the original intention of this mailing list: what skills
from high school are needed to be able to pass such an introductory
programming class?
One
So Kari raises a corollary - to what extent does it matter what mental
model of a computer the student has?
But this is also on the dimension of abstraction. For example, 'how main
memory works'. This might be at the level of addresses, binary contents
and read/write operations. Or at the more con
The OP thinks of this thread as a way of obtaining good advice. On the
basis of what he has seen, he has made a decision, and from his point of
view the thread has fulfilled its purpose and has ended.
However the original question - which language for an introductory class
- is something which ma
It indeed seems that there is no consensus over
what is a good language to start studying computer
programming.
I think that almost any language will do when only
the basic things are taught. On the page
http://www.naturalprogramming.com/all_example_programs.html
I provide
(forwarded on behalf of Andy Ko)
I'm amazed to see so many recommendations based on power, consistency,
expressiveness, and performance. These qualities are great properties
for people using languages on a daily basis to build shippable, robust
code. But in most cases, trying to teach what
Enda,
On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 09:15 +0100, Enda Dunican wrote:
> I was under the impression that the idea behind a discussion list
> was to allow people to express their opinions. I simply expressed an
> opinion. One could accuse your email of attempting to stifle freedom
> of expression, but I'd ne
I was under the impression that the idea behind a discussion list
was to allow people to express their opinions. I simply expressed an opinion.
One could accuse your email of attempting to stifle freedom of expression, but
I'd never agree with such an accusation!
Enda
Or it could have been an e
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