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From: rcj@burl.UUCP (Curtis Jackson)
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: Re: various recently-discussed topics (learning languages)
Message-ID: <1133@burl.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 19-Mar-86 15:54:44 EST
Article-I.D.: burl.1133
Posted: Wed Mar 19 15:54:44 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 21-Mar-86 03:34:04 EST
References: <1092@burl.UUCP> <1093@burl.UUCP> <117@andromeda.UUCP> <1549@gitpyr.UUCP>
Reply-To: rcj@burl.UUCP (Curtis Jackson)
Distribution: net
Organization: AT&T Technologies, Burlington NC
Lines: 43
Summary: 

In article <1549@gitpyr.UUCP> chen@gitpyr.UUCP writes:
>In article <117@andromeda.UUCP>, marco@andromeda.UUCP (the wharf rat) writes:
>>In article <1093@burl.UUCP>, rcj@burl.UUCP (me) writes:
>>>   ... He said, "Oh, yes,
>>>   get this book [holding up a copy of K&R] from the bookstore, $12.  You
>>>   have 2 weeks."  Now THAT is the way to teach a computer language!
>> 
>>      Why is that the way to learn a language ?  Admittedly, you can
>
>By the second year, a CS major had better realize that there's more to
>CS than just "learning languages".  I agree with Curtis.  CS people
>should be able to learn languages on their own.  This is because

Although my original statement above was mostly tongue-in-cheek, I do
agree with Ray.  When I went to work for the Naval Ocean R&D Activity
after only one semester of school and one on-punch-cards Fortran course
as my sum total computer experience, I found this out the hard way.
They sat me down in front of an HP 9825A Programmable Calculator and
handed me a foot-thick stack of manuals, saying, "Learn this thing's
language (HPL, a weird hybrid between assembler, BASIC, and Fortran),
and in two months we need a working documented data acquisition system
that will take in data from 1-4 temperature probes simultaneously,
each at exactly 20 samples per second, checking each point for validity,
putting the results onto both internal tape cartridge and this nine-track
unit simultaneously.  Oh, by the way, we need you to run this plotter
and plot up to four probes with offset so we can compare them, and we
also need a deviation-from-a-weighted-mean plotting program as well."

I look back at the code today and cringe because noone, not even 3 different
HP reps, could get the interrupts to work on the @$#%#@$$% thing, so it
has fun timing control statements in it like:

i = i + sqr(1)    /* increment i by the square root of 1 */

Other than that, though, it performed above and beyond their specs; I was
published at 17 years old as the co-author of an internal Teknote, but
MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL, the experience was incredible!!  When I went back
to school and took Pascal, it was a breeze!
-- 

The MAD Programmer -- 919-228-3313 (Cornet 291)
alias: Curtis Jackson	...![ ihnp4 ulysses cbosgd allegra ]!burl!rcj
			...![ ihnp4 cbosgd decvax watmath ]!clyde!rcj