Subj : Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
To   : poindexter FORTRAN
From : tenser
Date : Mon Jan 08 2024 03:58 pm

On 07 Jan 2024 at 08:00a, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...
 
 pF> -=> tenser wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-
 pF> 
 pF>  te> Honestly, at this point, I can't think of a good reason
 pF>  te> to teach C at the collegiate level.  Intro classes should
 pF>  te> arguably be in a functional language of some kind; I like
 pF>  te> Scheme, but Racket would be better; barring that, OCaml
 pF>  te> or even SML would work well.
 pF> 
 pF>  It is in much more common use than any of the other languages, so
 pF>  having some marketable experience is a good thing.

By that metric, Java, JavaScript (excuse me, ECMAscript)
and C++ are all more common than C itself; probably C#,
Python, and maybe even Visual Basic still.  I can appreciate
some marketable skill, but I'd counter that a) course-level
experience with a language often doesn't count, and b) with
a solid footing gleaned from other languages, I'd expect C
to be relatively easy to pick up to a reasonable level of
competency.

 pF>  te> For low-level details, I'd teach assembler on RISC-V, and
 pF>  te> then follow up with Rust or Go; maybe Zig.
 pF> 
 pF> I learned assembler on a VAX. Nice instruction set, but we only had a
 pF> handful of serial ports for a ton of students. I became a night-owl that
 pF> semester, logging on from 2-6am to get my work done.

I liked the VAX instruction set, but a few of them were
weird.  EDITPC, the POLY instructions (really?  A dedicated
instruction for finding the roots of arbitrary polynomials?),
and the queue instructions were kind of out there on the
complexity spectrum.  And then MOVC3 could cause something
like 24 page lookups or something wild thing like that.

 pF>  te> Things change over time.  Universities used to teach COBOL
 pF>  te> to CS students; now they don't.  Pascal was favored for a
 pF>  te> time, now it isn't.  Java even made a play for a while.  C
 pF>  te> is similar.
 pF> 
 pF> My university started a business/CS degree, they learned COBOL, PC
 pF> databases and the like. It might have been a more useful degree for me
 pF> than my "hard" CS degree.

Yeah, a lot of MIS/CIS places continued to teach COBOL for
a long time.  I wonder what they teach now....

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