[Year 12 Its] Don't water down the fun.

[Roland Gesthuizen]

I think Con has hit the nail on the head when he says that what tool that
you use to teach depends on what you need to teach. Sometimes it depends on
what you have available and how you wish to teach. 

We don't want to water down all the fun. A student teacher in my middle
school IT class just ran a great series of lessons programming with MSWLogo.
I havn't touched it in years but the students were engaged by his learning
strategies. I still recall the days in the early 80's when I goofed about
making a morse code generator in Apple Basic, tinkering with machine code
and analogue computing. Today my students are goofing about with GameMaker.
If it isn't serious enough, then I'll try a stern expression on my face.

Regards Roland

--
Roland Gesthuizen - eLearning Coordinator - Westall Secondary College 
http://www.westallsc.vic.edu.au
 

-----Original Message-----
From: is-bounces at edulists.com.au [mailto:is-bounces at edulists.com.au] On
Behalf Of Con Zymaris
Sent: Thursday, 12 May 2005 7:09 PM
To: Year 12 Information Technology Systems Teachers' Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Year 12 Its] Re: Naming Conventions

On Thu, May 12, 2005 at 05:43:15PM +1000, Bricks J. Winzer wrote:
> > Java was nowhere near the first to try this seriously.
> 
> > The UCSD Pascal system did essentially everything that Java later 
> > purported to do, but back in 1979: portable language, platform neutral 
> > runtime, threaded bytecode optimised interpreter etc.
> 
> Naturally.
> 
> When UNIX, or should I say UNICS, and its predecessor, MULTICS, were
> being developed in the late 1960s, there was a need to develop a high
> level programming language to build it with.  Pascal was used to write
> a language called B.  This then evolved into a new version: C.


Close, but not quite.

C was derived from B, which was in turn derived from BCPL:

 http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html

Pascal actually came _after_ Ritcihe created C.

 http://burks.bton.ac.uk/burks/language/oberon/obhist/history.htm


> 
> During the 1990s, C was used to create the Java langauge.  Java draws

Java derives from C++ not C. 

C++ was originally just C + objects, pushed out by Stroustrup (also at
Bell Labs) in 1986. The first C++ compiler I used in the late 80s was 
CFRONT from Bell, which was just a set of pre-processor macros munged 
before the code was sent to a standard C compiler. 

Full C++ compilers came later; among the first being Walt 
Bright's Zortech C++ 

 http://www.walterbright.com/

Neither Borland nor Microsoft built their own C/C++ compilers. They bought
out Lattice and Wizard C respectively. 

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:

 http://www.johnsmiley.com/visualbasic/vbhistory.htm

Java came from Oak, Gosling's pet project developed at Sun in 1989 to sell 
into the set-top TV market in the US and Japan. It failed in that market. 
The 'Language of the Internet' was merely a marketing afterthought by Sun 
and an opportunistic land-grab. 

ps: Gosling was also parent of the NeWS windowing system, which got its 
butt whupped by the X-Window system in the market in the late 80s, which 
is why he still hates X ;-)

 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/03/26/gosling_on_csharp_why_x/

> very heavily on its parent, and it's natural it still does much what
> its parent did. :)

It does, but with a 200 MB memory footprint for trivial apps. That sucks.

> 
> 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.

Cheers,
 
Con Zymaris, Convenor
Open Source Victoria
http://www.osv.org.au/

-- 
___________________________________________________________________________
Con Zymaris <conz at cyber.com.au> Level 4, 10 Queen St, Melbourne, Australia 
Cybersource: Australia's Leading Linux and Open Source Solutions Company 
Web: http://www.cyber.com.au/  Phone: 03 9621 2377   Fax: 03 9621 2477


_______________________________________________
http://www.edulists.com.au
IT Systems Mailing List kindly supported by
http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au - Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority
and
http://www.vitta.org.au  - VITTA Victorian Information Technology Teachers
Association Inc