Xref: utzoo comp.edu:2372 comp.lang.misc:3191 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!stat!stat.fsu.edu!mccalpin From: mccalpin@masig3.ocean.fsu.edu (John D. McCalpin) Newsgroups: comp.edu,comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: Which language to teach first? Message-ID: Date: 1 Aug 89 19:54:12 GMT References: <8514@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> <13158@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <6454@pdn.paradyne.com> Sender: news@stat.fsu.edu Organization: Supercomputer Computations Research Institute Lines: 20 In-reply-to: reggie@dinsdale.nm.paradyne.com's message of 1 Aug 89 11:23:21 GMT In reggie@dinsdale.nm.paradyne.com (George W. Leach) writes: > Many studies of programmer behavior have indicated that the >novice programmer thinks in terms of a specific language syntax, while >with experience comes more abstract thinking without worring about >implementation language details. [...] The trouble occurs when the poor students spend too many years with abstraction and forget that the purpose of the exercise is to solve a problem --- and that has to be done in a specific language with a specific syntax. A sad example of this was the "GOTO" war last year (or maybe the year before) in the Communications of the ACM. In a patronizing letter, an eminent computer scientist (whose name will remain unmentioned) gave the "correct" solution to a simple problem that had been batted back and forth as an example of a construct that was made *easier* to read with a GOTO statement. The problem was that the "solution" was not written in an existing programming language, but in a very obscure pseudo-code.