From: David Vallner <david@...>
Date: 2006-12-10T01:48:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Fwd: Seymour Papert Gravely Injured in Motorbike Accident

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M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> Along those lines, what do they teach undergraduates today? Mostly
> Scheme and Java, I think.
>=20

C in the freshman year. If I hadn't had some PHP and Pascal before (i.e.
hadn't mostly known the syntax and how to wrestle pointers), I'd prolly
have ran away screaming and was well on my way into middle management by
now.

It was a bad choice for a freshman language, with badly led courses -
the instructor was hopping rather erratically between stressing how the
point is to be able to develop the algorithms (which is a problem class
I don't like solving as opposed to design and data modelling), and on
the other hand abusing pointer arithmethics with reckless abandon in
example code. Oh, and fighting with me over C syntax until I started
bringing my copy of K&R - which I had by then memorised - to class.
(Humiliating college instructors is so rewarding in a very wrong way.)

After that an optional Java course, and then the classes shifted into
hardware more, when I only had classmates to troll with Ruby.

The software specialisation had the usual Logical and Functional
Programming, led mostly in a homebrewn Lisp 1.5, which -coincidentally-
a high-up professor had written a textbook on fifteen years or so ago.
(Huh? What is this "move on" you speak of?). I find it highly amusing I
can work out Prolog homework for people taking that introductory course
worldwide despite never having passed it. (In horribly procedural
Prolog, but hey.)

Scheme I didn't see any at all. If the Scheme courses are all similar in
structure to the SICP I know from the lecture videos, it seems more like
a course to teach how programs / programming languages work, than how to
program. Then again, it's hard to say where one ends and the other
begins. (And I suspect they actually overlap or one is a subset of the
other ;P)

And a graceless flunk soon afterwards. Ah well.

David Vallner
Hypergraphic


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