On Tuesday, 10 May 2016 at 13:40:30 UTC, Chris wrote:
On Monday, 9 May 2016 at 19:09:35 UTC, Joe Duarte wrote:
[snip]
Let me give you a sense of the sorts of issues I'm thinking
of. Here is a C sample from ProgrammingSimplified.com. It
finds the frequency of characters in a string:
int main()
{
char string[100];
int c = 0, count[26] = {0};
printf("Enter a string\n");
gets(string);
while (string[c] != '\0')
{
/** Considering characters from 'a' to 'z' only
and ignoring others */
if (string[c] >= 'a' && string[c] <= 'z')
count[string[c]-'a']++;
c++;
}
for (c = 0; c < 26; c++)
{
/** Printing only those characters
whose count is at least 1 */
if (count[c] != 0)
printf("%c occurs %d times in the entered
string.\n",c+'a',count[c]);
}
return 0;
}
[snap]
I went to www.programmingsimplified.com/c-program-examples and
found that this was example 48 out of 59. The examples start
with:
- Hello world
- Print Integer
- Addition
- Odd or Even
- Add, subtract, multiply and divide
- Check vowel
- Leap year
- Add digits
- [...]
and so on, with increasing complexity.
Nobody starts with examples like the one above. More likely
with number 1 in their list:
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf("Hello world\n");
return 0;
}
Not so difficult to understand.
You're arguing that the 32-line example on finding characters
frequency in a string was too complicated? I think it might help
to clarify my purpose in that post. It was to pick a random
example of a simple C program to illustrate the sorts of problems
programming syntax has from a cognitive science and pedagogical
standpoint. For my purposes, I didn't need to choose a 6-line
program, and something that short would probably undermine my
ability to illustrate some things.
Note also that I saw myself as being a bit *charitable* to C by
choosing that sample. For instance, I didn't use an example
littered with the word "void". Void in English most commonly
means invalid, canceled, or not binding, as in a voided check, a
void contract (such as where one party is a minor), and "null and
void" is a common usage, so starting a function declaration by
declaring it void is jarring. There was a discussion that Walter
linked to from the late 1980s I believe, where people were
requesting that this issue be fixed in C (Walter linked to it as
background on the naming of D I think). It's a hole in the type
system and bad syntax -- I predict that it adds confusion to
learning a language that uses it.
Something I've wondered is if foreigners actually have an easier
time with the syntax of English programming languages. The
jarring usage of terms like void, or things like dollar signs and
question marks to not mark dollars or questions, might not be
jarring to non-native English speakers, or non-English speakers.
For them, all this might just be arbitrary tokens and they'd just
have to learn what the tokens signify (and it's very interesting
to think about how they and English speakers learn this). Andreas
Stefik did some research where he used a randomly generated
programming syntax, I think it was called Randomo, and some
mainstream languages were just as hard to learn as the randomly
generated one (Java or C, I think -- they're both pretty bad
anyway). To non-English speakers, and especially
non-Latin-alphabet-users, all of our programming languages might
be randomly generated for all intents and purposes.
You gave a Hello World example above. Don't get me started on
Hello World. Well, too late... Here's the deal. It's not just
Hello World -- a ton of programming examples in online references
and introductory texts, perhaps most of them, present programs
that are pointless. By "pointless" I mean they do no useful work.
Commonly, they repeat something back to us. So here we're typing
64-ish characters into a console or something in order to have
the computer repeat back an 11-character string to us. If we have
to type "Hello World" (and a bunch of other stuff) in order for
the computer to display it, well we've not had a productive
interaction.
I think examples should quickly illustrate computers computing or
otherwise doing productive things for us. Displaying a string in
a console environment is also too far removed from normal
computing environments like a smartphone or Windows 10/MacOS
graphical desktop. If we're going to teach displaying a pop-up
message, we should cut right to a windowing environment from the
outset.
I think the Hello World example is also extremely confusing to
newbies and rational knowers. It's not clear why the main
function has an integer type, since we're not doing anything with
integers, why there is an empty set of parentheses after it (what
are they doing there?), why we're saying "printf" when we don't
want to use our printer, why there's a newline code *inside the
quotes*, why we are "returning" 0, and what that even means, and
of course why there are curly braces just sitting there on
otherwise blank lines. We just wanted to display "Hello World",
not deal with all this other stuff.
