Subj : Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
To   : poindexter FORTRAN
From : tenser
Date : Mon Jan 08 2024 03:51 am

On 06 Jan 2024 at 09:43a, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...
 
 pF> That makes sense, the PASCAL class was used mostly to teach data
 pF> structures and algorithms, then everything else was in C, assembler or
 pF> LISP. In retrospect I'd rather just jump into C or C++ instead of
 pF> spending time learning another language.

Honestly, at this point, I can't think of a good reason
to teach C at the collegiate level.  Intro classes should
arguably be in a functional language of some kind; I like
Scheme, but Racket would be better; barring that, OCaml
or even SML would work well.

For low-level details, I'd teach assembler on RISC-V, and
then follow up with Rust or Go; maybe Zig.

C's goal of being, essentially, a "portable macro assembler"
hasn't been true since the late 1970s, and the language is
a minefield of subtlety and undefined behavior that means a
program will work _most_ of the time, until it doesn't, and
then you need someone who's really studied the language
standard to figure out why.

Things change over time.  Universities used to teach COBOL
to CS students; now they don't.  Pascal was favored for a
time, now it isn't.  Java even made a play for a while.  C
is similar.

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