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From: eugene@ames.UUCP (Eugene Miya)
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: Re: pascal as an intro language (general intro languages)
Message-ID: <1422@ames.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 27-Feb-86 22:00:26 EST
Article-I.D.: ames.1422
Posted: Thu Feb 27 22:00:26 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 1-Mar-86 17:44:29 EST
References: <111@polyob.UUCP> <156@leopard.UUCP> <5125@kestrel.ARPA>
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Organization: NASA-Ames Research Center, Mtn. View, CA
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I know there are at least three other members of the Usenet who
sat on the Pascal Standards Committee when I did.

I've read several comments about what should be taught as well as
"Yes Pascal is a good teaching language."  I would qualify the
latter.  It was a decent 1970s teaching language.  Based on my ideas
about teaching programming [like those I mention from other letters]
such as "algorithmic thinking" and "problem solving," I no longer
think it's a good programming language for teaching.

Programming languages are too low-level.  I thought about attacking the
introductory programming language problem using a set of restricted
shell commands, pipes, and &'s to cover some of the issues of programming:
conditions and branching, sequential things, and parallelism (protection
of data, side effects and such).  I've heard that UCB was using AWK
as a first language.  We need a better environment to teach in.
Teaching a person about programming graphics for instance is done at
too low a level.  Note I said nothing about graphics or interfaces,
and performance (the ability to time a pipeline is certainly possible) in
my description of a teaching workbench(?), but these are the types of
things an introductory programming environment should now incorporate
(if this sounds like Smalltalk-80(tm), I want to go beyond that).
Interaction is important, to a degree, so are performance and functionality.

From the Rock of Ages Home for Retired Hackers:
--eugene miya
  NASA Ames Research Center
  {hplabs,ihnp4,dual,hao,decwrl,allegra}!ames!aurora!eugene
  eugene@ames-nas.ARPA
General disclaimer: the above are the opinions of the author and not
the Center or Agency.  Any mention of commerical products does not
constitute an endorsement and is only mentioned as a point of reference.

Obvious trademarks:
Smalltalk-80 is a trademark of Xerox Corp.
Xerox is a trademark of Xerox Corp.