/prog/ - Teaching programming

Name: Anonymous 2009-11-23 11:28

Hello, prog.

I've been thinking about something; why, when teaching programming, do people always start with a high-level language? It seems like it'd be confusing to have to learn the intricacies of the syntax of something like C, for example, while simultaneously learning the basics of programming in general. It seems like it'd be a better idea to start by introducing a (fictitious or otherwise) assembly language; something with just the basics for instructions: load, store, branch, and various mathematical and logical operators. This way, students could better understand the foundations for higher level languages like C, without getting confused and asking questions like "why do chars overflow at 256?" or "what do you mean a pointer stores an address, what's an address?". It just seems to me that it'd be best to know how exactly a computer works before trying to program it, as opposed to glossing over the issue and running into problems later.

Is this a bad idea?

Name: Anonymous 2009-11-23 11:32

My point exactly: In my efforts to understand the high-level syntax of BBCODE I have misspelled /prog/.

Name: Anonymous 2009-11-23 11:47

Most decent Universities start by giving you a micro and teaching you ASM.

Name: Anonymous 2009-11-23 11:49

Teach brainfuck as an intro.

Name: Anonymous 2009-11-23 11:55

>>1
Some do, but they are hardly the majority. The book "The Elements of Computer Systems" takes this road, but builds it completely from Boolean logic up to building a basic OS / programming language

Name: Anonymous 2009-11-23 12:01

Start with Knuth and The Art of Computer Programming. One advantage of using a real language not Haskell LOL is that you can produce meaningful output more easily. Staring at an instruction set simulator gets kinda old kinda fast.

Name: Anonymous 2009-11-23 13:42

The good ones will start with logic and digital circuits (basic gates), then digital sequential/memory, a rudimentary CPU and its instruction set, and programming in machine code for that before finally moving up to C. If you go further, they'll only then introduce OOP and usually C++.

Those who run JavaSchools disagree completely, because their purpose is only to give codemonkeys enough information to write enterprise-quality business shit. They are the ones who teach OOP before procedural (completely ignoring the fact that OOP is simply another layer on top of procedures, as methods are themselves procedural), leading students to believe that the best way to solve a problem is to start thinking about a class hierarchy with half a dozen objects instead of a simple algorithm that could be written as a 10-line method. After coming up with a huge set of classes, the students then have no idea what to write in the several dozen methods they've now "designed".

Name: Anonymous 2009-11-23 13:49

>>7
Oh god you made me remember those over-engineered EXPERT SOLUTIONS which are sometimes posted in help topics on forums. It's like those people never did any actual programming at all!!

As for myself, I started learning programming with C++, then before getting to templates and stuff I switched to C#. I believe that first learning C (or C++, but not as an OO language) is the best way.

Name: Anonymous 2009-11-23 21:24

testing