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From: shebs@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley Shebs)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Teaching Assembler on VAX (BSD
Message-ID: <4638@utah-cs.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 8-Jun-87 12:17:40 EDT
Article-I.D.: utah-cs.4638
Posted: Mon Jun  8 12:17:40 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 11-Jun-87 03:18:02 EDT
References: <7401@boring.cwi.nl> <170500007@uiucdcsb>
Reply-To: shebs@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley Shebs)
Organization: PASS Research Group
Lines: 30

In article <170500007@uiucdcsb> robison@uiucdcsb.cs.uiuc.edu writes:

>> ...Utah teaches functional programming
>> with Lisp, Scheme, and Miranda in several undergrad courses, but nevertheless
>> all we seem to produce are C hackers.
>
>Is this so bad?  I would hope the exposure to the declarative languages 
>would at least improve the C hackers' style.

From my point of view, C is portable assembly language, down to the
pointer-chasing and data-abstraction-by-using-macros.  It's sad to think
that after forty years of computing that has seen many radical changes,
99% of new programs are still written at the machine level.  If I didn't
believe that higher-level programming would be ultimately successful, I'd
probably get out of the field and do something else, but on the other hand,
the prospects don't seem very good.  "Improving style" is a laudable goal,
but doesn't do anything for all the other problems of using low-level
languages.

>(Note that this is the hacker's version of
>the old "learn Latin to improve your English" argument.)

Interesting analogy - in fact it took many centuries for English (and French,
etc) to displace Latin as the language of learning.  Will high-level
programming languages take as long?

>Arch D. Robison

							stan shebs
							shebs@cs.utah.edu