On Fri, 19 Feb 2016 02:51 am, Random832 wrote: > On Thu, Feb 18, 2016, at 07:25, Rustom Mody wrote: >> My beef is somewhat different: viz that post 70s (Pascal) and 80s >> (scheme) >> programming pedagogy has deteriorated with general purpose languages >> replacing >> 'teaching-purpose language' for teaching. > > The flaw in this idea is right there in your post. Both languages you > named are strongly tied to a single paradigm (procedural for Pascal, and > functional for Scheme) which don't match the paradigm that real-world > work is done in. Is there a new "teaching-purpose language"?
Scratch seems very popular for teaching young children. If I were 10, I would definitely check it out. The emphasis is on writing re-usable code snippets, collaboration, and graphics and animation. https://scratch.mit.edu/ But apart from that, I think that "teaching" versus "doing" language is a false dichotomy. Teaching languages should have a shallow learning curve (easy to get started and learn the language, easy discoverability). Production languages should have deep functionality and power. Those two are not *necessarily* opposed[1]. Good languages should have both: a shallow learning curve leading to deep functionality. Pascal was easy to learn and powerful, but it made the mistake of not standardising on a few critical functions that production languages need, like strings. Nevertheless, for the first 10 or 15 years, Apple used a mix of Pascal and assembly to write not just the operating system but a whole lot of applications for the Macintosh. Anyone who says that Pascal is a toy language is just ignorant. [1] Except in the trivial sense that the more you have to learn, the longer it will take. -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
