Re: D in the ix magazine about programming today
== Quote from Walter Bright (newshou...@digitalmars.com)'s article Georg Wrede wrote: - It has to be compiled to genuine executable code. The psychological weight of knowing what your code does, as opposed to a diffuse wish associated with your code to be interpreted, depending on the interpreter at hand [as opposed to actually disassembling the executable and seeing for yourself the actual result!], simply can't be underestimated. (I've really seen the difference with my students -- and how they've later fared in this arena.) When I learned programming, I never got it until I learned assembler and started comparing the language source code with the assembler emitted by the compiler. I know what you're saying. In general I never feel like I really get anything until I understand it on multiple levels of abstraction. For example, it took me forever to understand object-oriented programming. The semantics just seemed too arbitrary. What made me finally get it was: 1. Reading about design patterns (moving up a level of abstraction). 2. Understanding vtables and function pointers (moving down a level of abstraction).
Re: D in the ix magazine about programming today
bearophile bearophileh...@lycos.com wrote in message
news:hh76ur$1th...@digitalmars.com...
Georg Wrede:
- It has to be compiled to genuine executable code.
This is a very interesting topic, but I don't agree with some of your
ideas.
I think that today there are no languages really fit as first language.
Every language has downsides if you use for that purpose. And the sad
thing is, if you design a language for teaching, it probably comes out as
a toy language that no one wants to use anyway.
Said that, a teacher has to choose a language anyway. In my opinion the
best languages for such purpose are Python, D1 and Java. Other
alternatives are StarLogo (And its variants, like NetLogo), Processing,
the Logo that can be used to control Lego, and few others.
Java can be ok *only* if you start from an imperative standpoint and not an
OO standpoint. Years ago, I spent some time as a CS 101 tutor, and the
school (a Java school) had two CS 101 instructors: one (teacher A) started
with imperative programming and taught flow-of-execution and flow control
and then functions, etc, (and glossed-over the class MyApp{ static final
void Main() {} } boilerplate) and only moved on to OO once the students had
a good grasp of the imperative stuff. The other teacher (B) started
straight into OO, and only moved on to flow-of-execution late in the
semester.
I got a number of students from both teachers, but noticed an interesting
pattern: Every single one of the students I got from A already had a solid
grasp of the material. Their work was already completed and they had only
come to me to have it double-checked. I don't remember any of their work
ever being wrong. There were a few cases where I'd gave an extra little tip,
but they clearly knew what they were doing.
By contrast, every single student I got from class B was completely
bewildered, couldn't make head or tails of any of it, and essentially needed
to be completely taught again from the beginning. A number of them I had to
refer back to their teacher because they were so confused about it that the
only way I could have helped would be to develop a full CS 101 lesson plan
of my own, and #1, I felt that would be overstepping my bounds, and #2, at
minimum wage, that wasn't my f*ing job (actually, my real job there was
computer lab monitor, but the CS dept noticed that I knew what I was doing
with code, so they asked me to help tutor while I was there. Of course, why
a private non-party college with high entrance standards felt that they
needed a hired babysitter was, and still is, completely beyond me, but hey,
I was more than happy to take their money while I did homework, after all,
they sure as hell were taking a fuckload of my money, and providing jack-all
in return.).
But, I'm not convinced that professional languages (not that I consider Java
professional in any way) should be used as a day-1 starting point. They
absolutely should be taught relatively early, and any advanced programming
concepts should be taught using them (or with psudo-code and implemented
directly in a real language). But for most beginners, those languages are
way too dry (and I don't mean don't repeat yourself DRY, I just
meandry.).
For most people, programming is like math, it's a bunch of boring abstract
formalities. To prevent people from being turned away right at the
beginning, I think it's best to start with something that has a very high
degree of immediate *and interesting* feedback, and with minimal effort and
trip-ups. In other words, something like BlitzBASIC or DarkBASIC, that do
very easy pictures, sounds, and games (But not flash, because #1,
ActionScript and the Flash IDE are absolute fucking messes in any version
and that's only going to serve to confuse them, plus, since Flash is,
unfortunately, used frequently for real-world-work, it's unlikely they'll
ever come to understand why Flash and ActionScript are pure shit). The other
nice thing about that sort of language is that there's a lot they're not
suited for, so it'll be easier to ween them off when the time comes to move
to a professional language (which should be done *while* explaining in
simple terms why certain things are harder or more work than what they'd
been doing before, and what that's ok, or even desirable). You don't start
cooking with blowtorches, gas burners, and double-boilers, you start with a
toaster and a microwave, *then* learn the how's and the why's of the
trickier-but-better tools.
A lot of people would probably disagree with much of the above because You
can't unlearn something, but I've always felt that's a complete load of
bullshit. Of course you can, and painlessly too. I've done it plenty of
times. In kindergarten, I spelled of U-V. Obviously I unlearned that,
along with the bullshit claim about what sounds the letters O and F always
make in the english language. Anytime you've ever been corrected on
Dreadmoon Andromeda Release
http://dreadmoon.com/index.php?option=com_contentview=categorylayout=blogid=3Itemid=14 http://dreadmoon.com/ This release is primarily intended to eliminate a major roadblock to the development of games and multimedia applications under Linux that is a consequence of the fact that many of the related software libraries are not available as installable packages. These many libraries are the D libraries and programs required to have a build system on Linux. Tools are in developmental phase, as is the distro. DM Andromeda currently sports the arc03 branch, also.. http://arclib.blogspot.com/2009/12/source-code-repository-moving-to-github.html All ideas are welcome for the distribution. Email clay dot smith dot r at gmail dot com.
Re: D in the ix magazine about programming today
== Quote from retard (r...@tard.com.invalid)'s article Quite many young Haskell experts started with Haskell when they were 9-12 years old. Having english as your native language and academically educated parents has a tremendous effect on e.g. vocabularity at that age. Some slumdog might only know ~3000 words at that age, child of a highly educated family perhaps 25.000 words. I'm not saying that everyone should learn Haskell, but I know it's possible to learn stuff like Curry-Howard isomorphism, hylomorphisms, monads, monad transformers, comonads, and analysing amortized costs of algorithms at that age. It's just dumb to assume that young people can't learn something as complex as static types! I remember when I was that young, I used to play with QBasic. I knew very well why 'DEFINT A-Z' made all programs faster and knew what IEEE floating point looked like on bit level (well, at least mostly). I knew how to do blits in graphics programming since I already had done them in assembly on C-64. Had there been Haskell and all the modern tools available like today there is, I would have probably spent more time on them. Yes, but you were probably exceptionally talented and/or motivated. From experiences I have had getting friends through programming 101, I believe that, when people teach programming, they tend to take for granted some very basic concepts such as variable assignment, flow control and nesting. The first programming language should be one that strikes a balance between allowing the teaching of these basic concepts on the one hand and not being a completely useless toy language on the other. IMHO even Python's strong but dynamic typing is too complex for someone who has literally never programmed before. I think weak typing a la PHP or Visual Basic, so that the student doesn't even have to think about types until he/she understands variable assignment and flow control and has actually experienced the feeling of writing simple but useful programs, is the best way to start off. Good programming practices are useless if you end up totally lost on the variables and flow control level. Furthermore, I don't think good practices and well structured code can truly be appreciated until you've done it wrong first. Lastly, to most absolute beginners automatic conversion, e.g. from strings to numbers, probably seems like the least surprising behavior, since that is how it works in Excel, etc.
Re: D in the ix magazine about programming today
Sun, 27 Dec 2009 03:47:23 -0500, bearophile wrote: Georg Wrede: - It has to be compiled to genuine executable code. This is a very interesting topic, but I don't agree with some of your ideas. I think that today there are no languages really fit as first language. Every language has downsides if you use for that purpose. And the sad thing is, if you design a language for teaching, it probably comes out as a toy language that no one wants to use anyway. Said that, a teacher has to choose a language anyway. In my opinion the best languages for such purpose are Python, D1 and Java. Other alternatives are StarLogo (And its variants, like NetLogo), Processing, the Logo that can be used to control Lego, and few others. As a first language the need to be compiled to genuine executable code is irrelevant, performance, assembly and binaries are not interesting for a person that has to learn tell apart while from do-while and an array from a set. StarLogo is good because it teaches GUI and multiprocessing from the beginning, it helps develop some intuition regarding complex systems made of many simple small parts that interact, can be used and shared online, and it has a quite good visual feedback. Java is good because it's a real language, with tons of libs. And its compiler is very strict (stricter than the D compiler) so it helps develop good programming habits, and it helps spot bugs quickly. Being statically typed and being dumb (no type inference, etc) it helps learn to manage types in a manual and correct way (but the student doesn't learn higher level concepts, like higher level functions, functional programming, etc etc). It's simple enough (but not very simple to use), a little fussy, and helps teach some OOP. D1 gives more freedom, allows to learn pointers, linked lists, what a compiler spits out, it's a way to use assembly (inlining it), and you can learn almost as much OOP as with Java. It helps understand what the computer does when you write code, because there's a more direct relation between code and asm. It allows you to learn some C removing some of its disadvantages and in a safer way, removing some of the time wasted hunting for bugs in C code. If can even be used to learn a bit of functional programming (but not that much). Python is easy to use, less fussy, easy to read, its syntax is natural and usually such syntax doesn't get in the way. It's easy to learn and remember. Its indentation is both natural enough, clean and teaches how to indent code properly. It's flexible, it's a real world language with tons of libs (including tons of libs that can be used to teach all kind of things), it's practically useful for simple or complex tasks, it has enough C-like syntax that can be later used to teach Java or other similar languages. It can even be used to teach a bit of functional programming. It's not very good in teaching a tidy understanding of types. Its shell is really good for a newbie. To teach programming to students about 15-18 years old I think Python is currently the best first language, for first introduction to programming about 6-18 months long. Later D1 language (once it's more diffused and it has libs and its compilers are debugged, etc) can be useful to teach assembly, compilation, types, pointers, manual memory management, unions, struct and precise memory layout, to develop some intuition of the relation between program code and resulting asm, some more advanced data structures, other design patterns, etc. Java is not a real alternative to D1 here, because it lacks several things, but D1 is not common and refined enough, so some people may want to use Java as second language. Older students, about university ones, if they already know a language, may even start with Java as first language. But soon they need something different, like C or D or some functional/parallel language (like Haskell or something) to learn other paradigms. Younger students, like 8-14 years old may find something like StarLogo (and similar ones) as better than Python as first language (but here it's also a matter of the characteristics of the single student. Probably there are 12 years old students that can program in Python in a good way. Other students may need something simpler. Brains are different, so you can't teach everyone at the same speed and the same way!). Quite many young Haskell experts started with Haskell when they were 9-12 years old. Having english as your native language and academically educated parents has a tremendous effect on e.g. vocabularity at that age. Some slumdog might only know ~3000 words at that age, child of a highly educated family perhaps 25.000 words. I'm not saying that everyone should learn Haskell, but I know it's possible to learn stuff like Curry-Howard isomorphism, hylomorphisms, monads, monad transformers, comonads, and analysing amortized costs of algorithms at
Re: D in the ix magazine about programming today
dsimcha wrote: == Quote from retard (r...@tard.com.invalid)'s article Quite many young Haskell experts started with Haskell when they were 9-12 years old. Having english as your native language and academically educated parents has a tremendous effect on e.g. vocabularity at that age. Some slumdog might only know ~3000 words at that age, child of a highly educated family perhaps 25.000 words. I'm not saying that everyone should learn Haskell, but I know it's possible to learn stuff like Curry-Howard isomorphism, hylomorphisms, monads, monad transformers, comonads, and analysing amortized costs of algorithms at that age. It's just dumb to assume that young people can't learn something as complex as static types! I remember when I was that young, I used to play with QBasic. I knew very well why 'DEFINT A-Z' made all programs faster and knew what IEEE floating point looked like on bit level (well, at least mostly). I knew how to do blits in graphics programming since I already had done them in assembly on C-64. Had there been Haskell and all the modern tools available like today there is, I would have probably spent more time on them. Yes, but you were probably exceptionally talented and/or motivated. From experiences I have had getting friends through programming 101, I believe that, when people teach programming, they tend to take for granted some very basic concepts such as variable assignment, flow control and nesting. The first programming language should be one that strikes a balance between allowing the teaching of these basic concepts on the one hand and not being a completely useless toy language on the other. IMHO even Python's strong but dynamic typing is too complex for someone who has literally never programmed before. I think weak typing a la PHP or Visual Basic, so that the student doesn't even have to think about types until he/she understands variable assignment and flow control and has actually experienced the feeling of writing simple but useful programs, is the best way to start off. Good programming practices are useless if you end up totally lost on the variables and flow control level. Furthermore, I don't think good practices and well structured code can truly be appreciated until you've done it wrong first. Lastly, to most absolute beginners automatic conversion, e.g. from strings to numbers, probably seems like the least surprising behavior, since that is how it works in Excel, etc. Both Pascal and the original BASIC were strongly typed, and widely used for beginners.
Re: D in the ix magazine about programming today
Sean Kelly Wrote: If the problem is simply one of explaining typed variables to someone with a maths background, that's somewhat of a different problem. Err... I meant rebindable variables, thought I've never actually met a maths person who had trouble grasping that aspect of imperative languages.
Re: D in the ix magazine about programming today
Sean Kelly s...@invisibleduck.org wrote in message news:hhetss$26e...@digitalmars.com... Intro courses in the sciences are often intended to weed out the people There's a *lot* of things wrong with the way schools work. Deliberate weeding out is a clear red flag that a school cares more about their own statistics (graduation ratio, etc) than actual education: For any institution that claims to value education, trying to get someone to leave a class, *especially* an introductory class, is completely inexcusable(^1), and IMO should subject them to immediate revocation of their accreditation. But, of course, accreditation itself is completely screwed up too... 1: Imagine if you got a book out at a library, and the library decided you didn't understand it well enough and therefore tried to get you to return it early and then prohibited you from getting out any other books on the topic. It's the same fucking thing...except, with a school, you're paying them tens of thousands of dollars to be told what knowledge you can and can't pursue. And yet somehow, people insist in referring to college as, not only education (which would be big enough of a joke), but *higher* education. Completely pathetic! People who work for, or even willingly go along with, such a machine should be absolutely ashamed.
Re: D in the ix magazine about programming today
retard r...@tard.com.invalid wrote in message news:hhg67l$1lj...@digitalmars.com... Wed, 30 Dec 2009 13:13:07 -0500, Nick Sabalausky wrote: Sean Kelly s...@invisibleduck.org wrote in message news:hhetss$26e...@digitalmars.com... Intro courses in the sciences are often intended to weed out the people There's a *lot* of things wrong with the way schools work. Deliberate weeding out is a clear red flag that a school cares more about their own statistics (graduation ratio, etc) In fact many schools have made the courses much easier nowadays to get better statistics. The graduation ratio doesn't matter that much if it's a public school - they get funding based on the amount of people who have graduated. I think this model is much more common in Europe, at least. It all depends on things like what metric they're going for and how they expect things to work, but it almost always (if not always) boils down to being insincere or otherwise disrespectful to the students. A few examples: 1. Public colleges these days, at least in the US, want money, and thus overbook and accept beyond their capacity (ex, when I was at BGSU, they required all non-commuting freshman and sophomores to live in the dorms...but they brought in more than they had room for and stuck the extras in dorm lounge areas. And, of course, they charged them full room+board and didn't relax the must-be-in-a-dorm requirement, because all our students live in a dorm for two years is one of the things they like to brag about - so yea, their ability to boast definitely outweighs basic respect and living conditions for their own students.) This large number of students means low entrance criteria (which I don't necessarily have a problem with, but it depends on *what* the criteria is, and the criteria used I often disagree with), and thus a high percentage of students who don't have the slightest clue what they want to pursue. So, if they weed out students in introductory classes, they hope that those students (who are likely to be undecided majors anyway), will be pushed towards the areas they can sail through the easiest (not necessarily what they would actually like the most or be best served by), which maximizes the throughput of their revolving-doors. Of course other things are used to lubricate the revolving-doors too, for instance, extra credit and various other forms of grade-inflation. 2. For Ivy League, one of their primary goals is to maintain their Cadillac status (and the astronomical tuition they can demand as a result of that), so they don't want to waste any resources on students who aren't guaranteed to sail through advanced material without the instructor having to exhibit any higher-than-average teaching ability or effort (note also, that they take much of their bragging rights from their research, and a professor who's good at research may or may not be any good at teaching). So for these schools, their bottom-line is, again, best served by as much weeding-out as possible (ideally, anyone who doesn't already know the material inside and out). 3. For a school that doesn't grossly overbook sardines (or at least doesn't get enormous amounts of undecided majors), but also doesn't have Ivy League-ish status, their revolving doors get greased by not doing any weeding and hijacking quality by making grades and credits as easy to obtain as possible.
Re: D in the ix magazine about programming today
Nick Sabalausky a...@a.a wrote in message news:hhgac3$1vc...@digitalmars.com... retard r...@tard.com.invalid wrote in message news:hhg67l$1lj...@digitalmars.com... Wed, 30 Dec 2009 13:13:07 -0500, Nick Sabalausky wrote: Sean Kelly s...@invisibleduck.org wrote in message news:hhetss$26e...@digitalmars.com... Intro courses in the sciences are often intended to weed out the people There's a *lot* of things wrong with the way schools work. Deliberate weeding out is a clear red flag that a school cares more about their own statistics (graduation ratio, etc) In fact many schools have made the courses much easier nowadays to get better statistics. The graduation ratio doesn't matter that much if it's a public school - they get funding based on the amount of people who have graduated. I think this model is much more common in Europe, at least. It all depends on things like what metric they're going for and how they expect things to work, but it almost always (if not always) boils down to being insincere or otherwise disrespectful to the students. A few examples: 1. Public colleges these days, at least in the US, ... So, if they weed out students in introductory classes, they hope that those students (who are likely to be undecided majors anyway), will be pushed towards the areas they can sail through the easiest (not necessarily what they would actually like the most or be best served by), which maximizes the throughput of their revolving-doors. This also allows them to get by easier with mediocre teachers.
Re: D in the ix magazine about programming today
Walter Bright newshou...@digitalmars.com wrote in message news:hhgv3b$7c...@digitalmars.com... Nick Sabalausky wrote: Sean Kelly s...@invisibleduck.org wrote in message news:hhetss$26e...@digitalmars.com... Intro courses in the sciences are often intended to weed out the people There's a *lot* of things wrong with the way schools work. Deliberate weeding out is a clear red flag that a school cares more about their own statistics (graduation ratio, etc) than actual education: That may be true for some schools. But there are incoming students who simply don't belong, for a variety of reasons. I don't think it serves those students to string them along with both the school and the student pretending they can hack the material. Have you ever watched the tryouts on the TV show So You Think You Can Dance? They have some applicants who clearly just don't belong there. They are often asked if they've had training, and they'll say they've had 5 years of dance training. They cry when told by the judges that they have no talent. Apparently, none of their instructors told them this, they just continued to take the tuition money and compliment the student on how well he's doing. It's like me going to basketball camp. I will never, ever be a good basketball player, no matter how hard I try or how much coaching I get. It will never happen. For a coach not to tell me this is doing me a grave disservice, because I should be expending effort at something I can succeed at. Of course, if I then choose to take basketball anyway because I just love the game, that's fine, too. But it would be unreasonable of me to expect a top coach to be willing to coach me, even if I paid him $$$. He'll want to be coaching people who can succeed at basketball. See that's the thing, there's that middle-ground of sensibility right there that schools just won't go near. If they want to have a chat with someone about whether they think they're really on the right path, great. All problems solved. But instead they just play these bullshit games behind the students backs.
Re: D in the ix magazine about programming today
Nick Sabalausky a...@a.a wrote in message news:hhhfd4$12t...@digitalmars.com... Don nos...@nospam.com wrote in message news:hhgho0$2e8...@digitalmars.com... Australian universities get their money by having astronomical fees for overseas (Asian) students. There's a lot of pressure on academic staff to get them to graduate, no matter how poorly they perform. Yea, see, doesn't matter where you go, schooling is an absolute joke. And the worst thing is, these so-called educators game their own students as much as they can possibly get away with (which is a hell of a lot, given that schools are such sacred cows), and then raise hell for any student that tries to watch his own back (which I know from personal experience, many times over). Nothing but a bunch of goddamn crooks.
