It's the best language for teaching structured top-down programming. It forces the student to do things "The Right Way", vs. hacking around. Later, when the student knows why s/he shouldn't do it "The Right Way", then "The Right Way" takes its place as merely "One Of Many Right Ways". But, that first initiation is still extremely important.

I think that the move colleges are doing to teach in Java or C++ is bad. C++ is an extremely poor language to learn how to program in. It requires too much knowledge on the part of the student and allows too many shortcuts. While that's good for power users, students are, by definition, not power users.

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We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.

It's the best language for teaching structured top-down programming.

There I have to disagree. I didnt like Turing a lot, but if I had to teach someone to program and I had a choice between Turing and Pascal, Turing would win hands down. But not being so well known I can see why people might suggest Pascal. :-)


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demerphq

_{<Elian> And I do take a kind of perverse pleasure in having an OO assembly language...}

AFAIK, Prolog is even heavily in use in some large-scale custom software projects. It definitely has a niche that is quite hard to fill by languages like C++.

I had to learn some Prolog, Modula/2, ADA, ML, Scheme and Lisp in the first two years of my CS studies. In hindsight, I really appreciate the exposure; it has given me a good foundation to learn new languages and it has teached me many concepts that I wouldn't have learned that well if I had only learned Java or C++, for example.

Of course, these experiences also have led me to solidly dislike C/C++ *sigh*. I tend to think that too many apps are written in C++... makes me look forward to Parrot and Perl 6 even more!

very successful in their own way and their own niche

Yes I know. I was talking about for business use. The one that drives the vast majority of development that ends up paying the vast majority of our wages.

[Pascal] also was used very heavily in the DOS days of IBM PCs and in the early days of the Macintosh.

Indeed. A big chunk of the grphics layer of the Macintosh was written in Pascal. Or, well actually, no it wasnt. :-( It was written in something that resembled closely Pascal, but in fact was generally usable. Pascal as specified was virtually useless. Just about every implementation that was remotely useful jettisoned or changed the rules to make it work. Incidentally I cut my teeth programming TP3 on an 8088.

LISP was, and still is

I have a contemporary copy of the original proposal for the LISP machine from Mccarthy. Im well aware of the importance of LISP in a conceptual area. I am also well aware that there is virtually no business space code using it, and im also aware of some of the reasons why.

'Turing'

Was written by John Holt of UofT. And anybody that studied CS while he was there would have learned it. A pascal derivative designed to correct the errors of Pascal (such as bad error messages, see TheDamian's paper that he published on it, such as typing problems, see Dominuss article or Kernighams paper on the subject) while still keeping its strong orientation towards teaching. To be honest I generally hated the language, althogh it was the first time I had seem an auto-indenter (The turing interpreter came with an IDE that _enforced_ indentation) and all on one floppy too! ;-).

APL was for the longest time incredibly well suited for what it did

Your condemnation of these languages, and no doubt others, is, I think, a bit naive, and reflects a limited view of the field. While they may not be important to you, or be useful in the limited area in which you spend your time, that neither makes them useless nor failures.

Actually I didn't comdemn these languages. I observed that they were the product of an academic enviornment and that they were unsuited to a business enviornment. Which just happens to be what ends up getting most of us paid. This is not naive. This is real life.

Your definition of success and utility is, I think, rather more limited than it might seem at first glance.

I never stated my definition of success and utility. I stated a defintion for success and utility. And then claimed that those languages didnt meet it. And the dearth of job offers in these fields, the fact that these are not being discussed as the basis for new improvements, etc etc says that The Real World agrees with me. If any of these languages were more than I suggested then they would be being actively developed and extended as we speak. But they arent. We learned what there was to learn and now we are moving on.

Now Perl on the other hand seems like something that the The Real World will be wanting for a long time. The fact that there is the support that you have for Parrot is an indicator of that. Would you prefer that a few select professors thought your work was The Shit, or tens or hundreds of thousands of developers who use it every day, swear and sleep by it, and even occasionally dream about it? Little tip: the latter, most of them, get paid for programming for business.

, that neither makes them useless nor failures.

You would lose your APL bet. APL was heavily used in both finance and statistics. There are still quite a number of jobs where you need to know it because you have to maintain that code.

I stand corrected. Thank you. Is there any tendency to increase the utilization or is the intention generally speaking to port the code to other langauges? I would say the answer to that question would quite nicely sum up whether my opinion of APL was that off or not.


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demerphq

_{<Elian> And I do take a kind of perverse pleasure in having an OO assembly language...}