[Year 12 Its] Re: Naming Conventions

[Bricks J. Winzer]

Well - what can I say.  My knowledge is ancient.  It was my Year 11 IT
teacher in 1993 who told us C was written in Pascal :O  And my flakey
knowledge of UNIX comes from my first year at uni, 1995.

I spoke to my friend who is a programmer - he pointed me to
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/posters/tongues/tongues.jpg
Awesome stuff.

> Java derives from C++ not C.

Is there really such a difference between C and C++?  I'm told there
is (by programmer friend who thinks I'm an idiot for thinking there's
no difference ;)).

> While we're on it, I'm sure you're all aware that Microsoft didn't write
> Visual Basic? Alan Cooper of Cooper Software did:

I had a feeling that would be the case :)  I remember QBASIC from DOS
5.0 (and DOS 6.0 but not 6.2)... had it been in DOS 6.2 I think more
people would remember the Snake game from QBASIC and not from Nokia :)

>> As a teacher, I know that I'd rather teach students Pascal than C or
>> Java.  Is Delphi popular?  I'm personally a VB "enthusiast" but accept
>> that it has a lot of shortcomings.

> It depends what you want to teach.

> VB makes easy things trivial and complex things impossible.

> If you want to teach join-the-dots snap-lock prgramming, then VB is fine.  

> If you want to do anything more serious - for instance, show me how easy
> it is to create linked data srtuctures in VB - then VB is more complex 
> than C.

> One thing is certain - if all a student knows is VB, they are not taken
> seriously as a prgroammer by the professional coding fraternity. They must
> show they can scale mentally beyond VB.

You sound quite objective there :(

I'll stick to VB.  The kids are more motivated by getting things to
work, I'd rather have them achieving something than being frustrated
by apparently-correct code which doesn't work (my experience with
Java).

For the record, I'm in my second year of teaching.  I don't have the
experience and expertise of some of the more hardened members of this
list ;)

----------
B.J. Winzer
St Columba's College
Essendon