Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!mordor!sri-spam!sri-unix!quintus!pds
From: pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: : First Languages
Message-ID: <725@sandino.quintus.UUCP>
Date: 3 Mar 88 18:56:46 GMT
References: <1016@its63b.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 34
Keywords: ML
Summary: Knowing HOW to program doesn't necessarily mean you'll learn
	 a new language very quickly.

In article <1016@its63b.ed.ac.uk>, cstjc@its63b.ed.ac.uk (A Cunnigham) writes:
> But if you know HOW TO PROGRAM then it doesn't matter if you know C ( or any
> other language for that matter ). All you need is the manual and a language
> definition.

To take you out of context, this isn't really true.  If you take a
skilled 20 year veteran assembly language programmer and give hime an ML
or Prolog or Smalltalk manual and interpreter, it'll probably take him
quite a while to get to the point where he can program comfortably in
any of those languages.  There are important (necessary!)  concepts that
he hasn't had to face (inheritance, backtracking, unification,
recursion).  It also works the other way.  If you take a really good ML
programmer that has never seen anything so low-level as Pascal, and give
him an assembler and manuals, it'll be a while before he can make use of
it.

I still believe it is a good idea to teach a relatively pure language as
a first language, but I don't think you can really get away without
teaching a broad spectrum of languages.  There are algorithimic issues
that you just don't see in ML or Prolog (e.g., algorithms that rely on
destructive operations).  And as someone who has been struggling to
become comfortable with C, let me add that if you can teach the
specific languages that the programmer is going to need in the outside
world, so much the better.

There are two separate tasks:  teaching programming TECHNIQUES, and
teaching programming LANGUAGES.  I think the former is much more
important, and if it can be done more easily in a pure langauge (which I
believe is true), then it should be.  It'll be easier for a graduate to
later pick up a language than a technique or discipline.  But better he
should have BOTH when he graduates.
-- 
-Peter Schachte
pds@quintus.uucp
...!sun!quintus!pds