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From: fouts@orville.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc,comp.edu
Subject: Re: How to teach computers
Message-ID: <214@ames.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 25-Jan-87 00:58:34 EST
Article-I.D.: ames.214
Posted: Sun Jan 25 00:58:34 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 25-Jan-87 10:36:29 EST
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Reply-To: fouts@orville.UUCP (Marty Fouts)
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Xref: watmath comp.lang.misc:194 comp.edu:61

Actually, what you teach a beginner depends a whole lot on what the
beginner's going to do with it in the end.  If you've got grade school
kids and you still believe in CAI, you probably ought to teach them LOGO,
because you want them to get the interactive/experimentation pardigm.  You
should probably also have a turtle robot, it's much more fun to paint on the
floor.

If you've got high school kids or continuing education students and you want
to make them computer literate, go ahead and teach them BASIC, after all
it's just LOGO for adults (:-)

If you are running a body shop to produce application programmers for BofA,
teach them COBOL and make them read Jame Martin.  Don't even mention electrons
to them, they've got enough problems.  If their managers, just let them read
James Martin.

If you are teaching social scientists, teach them SPSS or SpeakEasy and give
them Disspla or some such for their graphics.  If they are engineers or
scientists, give them FORTRAN (shudder) and stay out of their way.  (Well,
maybe a numerical analysis class if you are brave.)

If they think they are going to be software engineers when they grow up, teach
the ADA first, and then teach the one's that are left PL/1.  Then let the
survivors know they have to program in JOVIAL.

If they want to be computer scientists, don't teach them any languages,
concentrate on concepts and give them programming assignments.

It doesn't really matter,  the ones that were born to it will do good despite
your best efforts, the ones who don't belong here will do poorly no matter
how hard you try, and the ones in the middle will respond about the same way
to any first language.