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From: elg@killer.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: software engineering
Message-ID: <734@killer.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 2-Apr-87 23:36:52 EST
Article-I.D.: killer.734
Posted: Thu Apr  2 23:36:52 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 5-Apr-87 13:02:39 EST
References: <7916@clyde.ATT.COM>
Organization: The Unix(tm) Connection, Dallas, Texas
Lines: 45

in article <7916@clyde.ATT.COM>, spf@bonnie.ATT.COM says:
> In article <4428@utah-cs.UUCP> shebs@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley Shebs) writes:
>>One radical
>>solution might be to de-emphasize writing programs, and require reading them,
>>starting with the first course.  I would be interested in hearing if anyone
>>has tried making a first- or second-year CS class modify programs that were
>>much too large for them to have written themselves...
> 
> but three or four programs or procedures to be READ by the student.
> With the latter, they would either have to write down the output
> given the input, or find the syntax errors, or find the semantic/logic
> errors. 

FIND SYNTAX ERRORS? Talk about DISGUSTING... one thing that irritated me
greatly in my intro CS class was semicolon-bashing on Pascal programs (and at
the time, my Pascal was a bit rusty, because I'd spent the last couple of
years in "C", BASIC, and 6502 assembly language). What you get is those
"clerical minds" again -- people who memorize the nit-picking details
of Pascal syntax, and teachers who look for the most obscure code they
can find (which is a VERY bad example -- some of those pascal programs
looked like they'd won USENET's annual Obfusticated "C" contest, and who
knows, maybe some of those impressionable students got the wrong
impression?). Everybody knows that when you have a question about
syntax, you look it up in a book, or look at the generated assembly
language to make sure it's doing what you want it to do.

> This reflected my experience in the lab: people who can't
> READ programs are pretty bad at WRITING them, especially when forced
> to live with the error messages produced by the VM/CMS compiler (ugh!).

Possibly. But digging up buggy, obfusticated code and telling people to "trace
the output" isn't going to help anybody do anything.  I must admit that I
learned most of my "C" by reading sources posted to the net (e.g. "Larn"), and
frantically flipping thru my "C" book trying to figure out what was going on
(ok, so I cheated at Larn, kill me :-). But that kind of activity has no
relation to the usual "here's ten lines of bletcherous code, tell me what's
wrong with it" type of thing.

 * Airwick *

--
Eric Green   elg%usl.CSNET     Hacker-in-training, University of SW Louisiana
{cbosgd,ihnp4}!killer!elg      
Snail Mail P.O. Box 92191          May you have the wisdom to see what must
Lafayette, LA 70509                be done, and the strength to do it.