[3796] in Depressing_Thoughts
Re: Foxtrot
nosaj@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (nosaj@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Sat Apr 24 18:35:19 1993
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My major gripe with traditional programming courses is that the ones which
use real programming languages (Pascal or C, instead of something like
BASIC) generally don't teach students to write robust code. One advantage
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ding! ding! ding! ding!
And that's because they don't really tell people how the language actually
works. I don't know how long it took before I figured out what a local
variable actually is; they finally taught us this in .004 when we were
working with the stack.
People who don't quite understand how printf works will do stuff like
printf("%d %s\n", 1.0, "Why doesn't this work?");
Obviously, you don't have to know some of the lower-level parts of
C, but it's better to know the basics well than to know a lot of crud
and not know it very well.
anyway, this is off topic too, so feel free to ignore it.
(oh, and yes, i agree with you, Scheme has a lot less of the frustration
factor once you know how to do most programming constructs in it.)
