I know -- it's a really tough call to make and it's really hard to remember back to when the basics seemed so hard.
I am reminded of my own education where I learned Pascal first and then took C as an elective. I know it's comparing apples to oranges (for the most part) but I feel Pascal was a waste of time.
C may have been harder to learn (especially if I had started out with it) but at least it was much more useful later on in life (both in later college classes and in the job market). My C (and C++) are very rusty these days but I still reap some benfit when trying to get things to compile. I don't think I have even seen any Pascal since college.
So I look at this and think to myself -- they will gain some beneift from learning the fundamentals in Spanish Perl but if they learn real Perl then they will also potentially benefit much more later on in life. | [reply] |
Interesting that you think learning Pascal was a waste of time. The research I've read about (sorry, no references) indicates that Pascal is a significantly better teaching language than C. The gist was that programmers who learn Pascal first do better than those who learn C first, as they actually learn some programming principles rather than diving straight into high-level assembler. There may be benefits from your Pascal experience that you don't even realize.
On the actual topic, it's widespread practice to use English reserved words in nearly all programming languages. The French produced a version of COBOL with French reserved words, but then they have an Academy devoted to the purity of the French language. Any other instances?
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Is C really that much more difficult to teach in? Difficult enough that it justifies creating an entirely new language? I stopped using Pascal as soon as I learned C (so it never survived college) and looking around today Pascal seems to have faded into obscurity -- how good of a language was it exactly?
And was all of that hand-holding it provided worth it? Pointers can be confusing as heck but is that because the concept is confusing or because computer basics were never taught? And if they were never taught then why was that? Perhaps because Pascal let the teachers avoid the subject?
I think the time spent creating a new language could have been better spent developing a better Computer Science Curriculum. The Harvard Calculus Reform Project (aka Calculus Consortium at Harvard) comes to mind.
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Someone learning programming is learning programming, not a programming language. Once you've grasped the concepts of functions, loops, variables, etc., picking up a new language is just so much syntax.* So Pascal was very valuable to you: it taught you the concepts in a simpler way, and when you picked up C you picked it up vastly more easily than you would have otherwise. If this were Slashdot, I'd proceed with an excruciatingly in-depth car analogy (probably something to do with a posh chauffeur learning to drive in a beat-up Mini). But it's not, so I'll leave it there. :) * Unless it's Haskell, but that's a special case!
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Actually, learning programming is both learning programming and learning a programming language. It's really unavoidable. So why should one part of what you are learning be very useful while the other be only moderatly useful?
Regarding Pascal, what if I had learned C first and then picked up Pascal? The argument then would be that C was very valuable to me. Granted Pascal was likely easier to learn but maybe it simplified things too much? Maybe if I had learned in C to begin with I would have grasped concepts like pointers and stuff sooner (or better yet if we had started in assembler).
There are a lot of variables involved and it is not clear to me that Pascal was really the best choice for Computer Science majors.
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