[rescue] flamewar question: Perl

[Ken Hansen]

Greg,

An Intro. programming class based on Ada? What was that, drinking from a firehose
state U or something? ;^)

My point was that the number of students that enter a school of the caliber of MIT
that have not programmed something has to be quite small (it is a science school,
and I would venture to say that everyone entering this fall is web-savy, and
probably did some spreadsheet or access DB work in support of whatever discipline
they are persuing...

Comparing a language "description" to a formal "specification" is
apples-to-oranges. The K&R book is under 150 pages long, and is conversational in
tone. That the ISO group could not be as susinct/brief does not make the language
harder to learn (just maybe implement ;^)

I could describe C in a 50 page document myself - does that make scheme and C equal
on some level?

I would further venture to say that most fols that take intro to programming
classes at MIT are probably *not* going to take any further classes in
programming... They are fulfilling a core-requirement I suspect.

I would prefer that career programmers start with commercially popular tools, then
learn the benefits of "alternative" programming languages as needed... Remember, at
one time C was a fringe language in most college Comp. Sci. departments too...

Ken

Greg wrote:

> > BASIC, Pascal, Pilot, Forth, FORTRAN, C, COBOL, 370 Assembler, Perl, Java, PHP
> > - that's my progression.
>
> BASIC, Forth, Pascal, Ada (introductory language at my college, darn it),
> 68k assembly, C, C++, Perl, SPARC assembly, Scheme, ...
>
> > Introductary courses at MIT are not the same as intro courses at the local
> > community college, remember. How many folks arrive at MIT and *never*
> > programmed computers? Anything counts, Logo, BASIC, C, Pilot (!), etc...
>
> My understanding, which could be wrong as I've never been to MIT, is that
> MIT uses it to teach programming to the students that have never programmed
> before (not everyone at MIT is a programmer, apparently, they must teach
> other things too :-).
>
> The point is that Scheme introduces you to programming concepts without the
> language getting into the way.  Those concepts and skills can then be
> applied to other languages.  Having explored Scheme practically last in my
> progression, I realized that it would've been much better to have learned to
> solve programming problems in Scheme first.  The entire Scheme programming
> language is described in a 50 page document (r5rs), have you seen the
> standards for C or C++?  The language is easy, the programming techniques
> and problem solving skills are the important part.
>
> Very few people are going to make money programming in Scheme, lots of
> people would be better programmers in other languages having learned Scheme.
>
> -greg
>
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