After quite a few years teaching J, I taught Basic for a semester (poorly). I struggled to consider teaching the High School course in Advanced Placement Computer Science and could make no sense of it and declined the "opportunity".
I did find that several years of teaching Visual Basic at a two year community college was helpful for manipulating images and actually doing practical things. It was as close as I ever came to "real programming" as opposed to J. Linda -----Original Message----- From: programming-boun...@forums.jsoftware.com [mailto:programming-boun...@forums.jsoftware.com] On Behalf Of R.E. Boss Sent: Sunday, December 02, 2012 4:25 AM To: programm...@jsoftware.com Subject: Re: [Jprogramming] @: and capped fork http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/edsgerdijk201164.html or, as I heard him say much shorter: "Basic ruins your life". R.E. Boss > -----Oorspronkelijk bericht----- > Van: programming-boun...@forums.jsoftware.com > [mailto:programming-boun...@forums.jsoftware.com] Namens Boyko > Bantchev > Verzonden: zondag 2 december 2012 0:10 > Aan: programm...@jsoftware.com > Onderwerp: Re: [Jprogramming] @: and capped fork > > On 1 December 2012 16:17, Ian Clark <earthspo...@gmail.com> wrote: > > A "training wheels" form of J, tailored to people who know BASIC, > > would be so easy to write. > > Not necessarily. A BASIC thinking can be so different that hardly any > tailoring could possibly exist as a bridge to J. > > Here is a story. > > True BASIC is the modern realization of Kemeny & Kurtz's original > BASIC. The product is priced at $500. Its web site says that > 'thousands of schools, colleges, corporations, and laboratories use > True BASIC'. Like the original BASIC, True BASIC's principal target > area of application is education. > > But … there are no first-class Boolean values in this language, or > anything in their place. There are no Boolean (or equivalent) > constants. Boolean expressions can only be used as conditions in > statements like IF and DO WHILE, but they are not supposed to have > values. The outcome of Boolean expressions cannot be stored in a > variable, passed as an argument or returned from a function. > > Among other things said of this BASIC is that 'it helps … teach the > foundational principles of logic'. Yet, in the tutorials and other > teaching and learning aids one never finds problems that explicitly > involve logic. The latter is no surprise: logical calculations are a > hard thing to do without logical values. > > 'True BASIC' programmers don't even realize that not having a form of > Boolean in the language is a limitation. This is a world with almost > no common points with the expression-based world of J. > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
