On Friday, 10 June 2016 at 18:59:02 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
then as it is later. In some ways, it would actually be very beneficial to actually go back to school to study that stuff after having programmed professionally for a while, but that's a pain to pull off time-wise, and the classes aren't really designed with that in mind anyway.
I am definitively considering it, maybe on some topics that I've read on my own, to fill in the missing bits. Or topics that has had some advances since the 90s. It wouldn't be too much of a pain as I could get there in 15 minutes on a bike, so it would just be exercise. I believe lectures at the University of Oslo are open to the public if there is enough space, and the fee at the University of Oslo is at $100/semester so the threshold for signing up is low. And I don't even have to do the exam, which probably makes it more enjoyable.
When I started out in school, C++ was the main language, but it quickly changed to Java, which removes all kinds of certain problems, but it still has a lot of extra cruft (like forcing everything to be in a class and a ton of attributes forced to be on main), and it doesn't at all prepare students to properly deal with pointers and memory. So, students starting out with Java have some fun problems when they then have to deal with C or C++. Alternatively, there are folks in favor of starting with functional languages, which has certain advantages, but it's so different from how folks would program normally that I'm not sure that it's ultimately a good idea.
I went to a high school that had programming/digital circuits on the curriculum. In the programming we started with Logo, which actually is kind of neat, as you are working with very concrete intuitive geometric problems. Then we went on to Turbo Pascal. It wasn't challenging enough, so the better students went with digital circuits and machine language for the last year. At the uni the entry level courses used Simula, but later courses used C, Beta, Scheme, etc, based on the topic. In several courses I could use whatever language I wanted for projects as long as the assistant teacher could read it. Made sense since the grades usually were based on a final exam only.
world. I don't envy teachers having to figure out how to teach basic programming concepts.
Yes, some people are simply never going to be able to do programming well... I'm talking having trouble reading code with basic input - output loops (not even writing it) after having it carefully explained to them many times. With some students you know they will never be able to pass the exam after the first few sessions. But you cannot tell them to quit... so you have to encourage them, basically encouraging them to strive towards a certain failure. That's frustrating.
Educational institutions should probably have an aptitude test. At the entry level courses maybe 30% are never going to be able to become even mediocre programmers.
