Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!ogicse!decwrl!megatest!djones
From: djones@megatest.UUCP (Dave Jones)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: introductory language
Message-ID: <12603@goofy.megatest.UUCP>
Date: 14 Apr 90 01:55:43 GMT
References: <960021@hpcll14.HP.COM>
Organization: Megatest Corporation, San Jose, Ca
Lines: 60

From article <960021@hpcll14.HP.COM>, by davee@hpcll14.HP.COM (Dave Elliott):
> 
[ He changed from Pascal to C. Then... ]

>   These are my observations:
>     1) More students are dropping out of the program during the first
>        month.
  ...
>     2) Students are having a harder time grasping the concepts of the
>         second and third month because they are still struggling with C.
>     3) The quality of the students' programs have suffered.
>     4) It is harder to find good textbooks that use C.
>     5) The students that graduate are having an easier time finding jobs.
>   

I find much of this rather surprising. In what ways do the students find
C to be more difficult? (Are you using ANSI C and lint, by the way?) Could
you save the day by replacing some of the standard library routines with
easier to use, but perhaps less general ones?

The part about finding good text-books may be true. I have often
toyed with the idea of writing an introductory text using C.

BTW, when I was teaching, the most popular text on Pascal, by far, was
_Oh! Pascal_, an overblown, horrid, rambling, condescending book that
contained some of the worst semi-correct Pascal programs I have ever seen.
(Check out "gerunds" for a tragic laugh.) They have since replaced it
with an even larger second edition. You could stun an ox with it,
but I'm not sure anyone can teach a student with it.

I would think that the recent C++ craze would have spawned a large
number of texts using that language. Are any of them any good?
That to me would seem to be the way to go. C++ is, IMHO, an improvement
over orignial C.

> There's no doubt that employers are viewing C knowledge as a big
> advantage in choosing among applicants.

That may be a little silly. A good programmer should be able to pick
up most languages rather quickly, provided he has a good understanding
of what compilers and linkers do. But then I guess there are employers out
there who are silly. My recommendation would be, read a book on the
language that the employer specifies, whatever it may be, then put
it on the resume.

> My recommendation would be to teach the introductory CS courses in
> Pascal.

Arrrrghh. There must be a better choice than that.

> Once the students are completely comfortable with the concepts of
> good programming, give a course on "C for the Pascal Programmer".

How are the students to become "completely comfortable with the concepts
of good programming" if they must group all structure definitions together
in one place, procedure declarations in another, and have no mechanism for
creating and using library packages, or for defining variable length
arrays? You must be thinking of some Pascal extension or another. Plain
Pascal makes it utterly impossible to program non-trivial applications
well.