kj wrote:
In <5f0a2722-45eb-468c-b6b2-b7bb80ae5...@q11g2000yqi.googlegroups.com> Simon Forman
<sajmik...@gmail.com> writes:
Frankly, I'm of the impression that it's a mistake not to start
teaching programming with /the bit/ and work your way up from there.
I'm not kidding. I wrote a (draft) article about this: "Computer
Curriculum" http://docs.google.com/View?id=dgwr777r_31g4572gp4
I really think the only good way to teach computers and programming is
to start with a bit, and build up from there. "Ontology recapitulates
phylogeny"
I happen to be very receptive to this point of view. I had the
benefit of that sort of training (one of the first computer courses
I took started, believe it or not, with Turing machines, through
coding in machine language, and compiler theory, and all the way
up to dabbling with Unix!), and I suspect that the reason it is
sometimes difficult for me to explain even relatively simple-looking
things to others is that I have this background that I unconsciously,
and incorrectly, take for granted in others... There is this
persistent idea "out there" that programming is a very accessible
skill, like cooking or gardening, anyone can do it, and even profit
from it, monetarily or otherwise, etc., and to some extent I am
actively contributing to this perception by teaching this course
to non-programmers (experimental biologists to be more precise),
but maybe this idea is not entirely true... Maybe, to get past
the most amateurish level, one has to, one way or another, come
face-to-face with bits, compilers, algorithms, and all the rest
that real computer scientists learn about in their formal training...
kj
And I learned to program Analog Computers, along with APL, in an early
course. In my case assembly language came later, but by then we had
covered the electronics behind transistors, and Karnough maps, logic
diagrams, and so on. By the time I graduated, I had five six-level
languages and two assembly languages under my belt.
.DaveA
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