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From: albaugh@dms.UUCP (Mike Albaugh)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: Which language to teach first?
Message-ID: <791@dms.UUCP>
Date: 1 Aug 89 16:27:02 GMT
References: <3876@shlump.nac.dec.com>
Organization: Atari Games Inc., Milpitas, CA
Lines: 39

From article <3876@shlump.nac.dec.com>, by gentile@horsey.dec.com (Sam Gentile):
> 	Allthough I love C and do most of my work in C, I don't think it is a
> good first language to learn for a student. I found C very difficult at first 
> and I had a lot of problems with it. Also some C coders write code that is
> completely un-readable. I think BASIC should be abolished and certainly not
> taught as a first language. It gives people very bad first habits. I don't
> think FORTRAN is a good first language either. I think PASCAL is still the
> ideal first language for a student. It will expouse the student to the 
> concepts of pointers in a more friendly way than C and teach structured
> programming habits.

	Just a (hopefully) short remark from one of those in the trenches.
While I agree with most of the above, I have a queasy feeling about Pascal
as a first language. I have been bitten _hard_ by three systems now in _very_
similar ways. Each was programmed in Pascal and each (despite high price and
"professional" reputation) had a totally rookie-level bug in it. While
not identical, the bugs all boiled down to the programmer not checking for
overstepping the assumed boundary of some resource (disk space, pool memory,
etc.) I can not help but suspect that people who learn programming first
in Pascal have been subconsciously trained that "the compiler will not let
me exceed array bounds" and carry that belief into areas where it is patently
false.

	That said, I have no real objection to people learning Pascal in an
introductory course, provided it can be _gauranteed_ they will learn some
other language before writing any code that someone else will have to use.
Of course, the same could be said for 8086 assembler :-)

 	Those are just (some of) my opinions on the subject. I would also
like to hear what other people have to say.

BTW, I just finished a re-write of a program which, while nominally written
in C served as more proof that "Real Programmers can write Fortran Programs
in any language" :-)

| Mike Albaugh (albaugh@dms.UUCP || {...decwrl!turtlevax!}weitek!dms!albaugh)
| Atari Games Corp (Arcade Games, no relation to the makers of the ST)
| 675 Sycamore Dr. Milpitas, CA 95035		voice: (408)434-1709
| The opinions expressed are my own (Boy, are they ever)