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From: bzs@bu-cs.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: How to teach computers
Message-ID: <3885@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: Sun, 1-Feb-87 16:59:06 EST
Article-I.D.: bu-cs.3885
Posted: Sun Feb  1 16:59:06 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 3-Feb-87 03:38:56 EST
Organization: Boston U. Comp. Sci.
Lines: 44


Brad makes a valid point that in "the real world" one rarely looks
at an algorithm and then decides on the best programming language.
That many other factors (availability, familiarity etc) will come
first.

No real argument but I think there is another point to be made that
is more important: Once exposed to a language like Snobol (as an
example of a language that prompts wonderfully innovative solutions
to problems) many good programmers can (more or less) write Snobol
in C. Or Lisp in Pascal or whatever.

It won't be pure, it will be in fact trivialized, but having seen
how these languages handle certain problems those problems really
do become much easier to think about whatever the language of implementation
is, wouldn't seeing a comment in a C program like:

/*
 * Having consed the new string structure into the list
 * we'll now do a span/break match finally calling the
 * garbage collector to get rid of the deletions, the
 * car should be a picture-like format specifier to dump
 * the result with. Parameter passing to this routine can
 * be best described as similar to call-by-name.
 */

be more confidence building than thinking a person had just made up
their solutions out of whole cloth? Gee, I'd almost believe a person
who wrote a comment like that might actually know what s/he's talking
about and knows how to steal good ideas where another is just
inventing with every new line of code (gee, are they really as bright
and creative on the fly as the whole rest of the CS community's
combined 30 year efforts were...maybe.)

Obviously we have to assume that something like that above is really a
good solution to the problem at hand and not just a show-off. I am, in
practice, far more disturbed by all the programs which don't realize
they are just solving a well understood problem, such as garbage
collection or string manipulation.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University

P.S. Comments in my programs often look like that, often starting with
the caveat "this only looks like a FOO program...".