[socal-piggies] Weeding out people who can't program

[Chuck Esterbrook]

On 7/14/06, Titus Brown <titus at caltech.edu> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> here's that paper I referenced last night:
>
> http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf
>
> --titus

I wonder if the inconsistent group could be improved by:
1 - Informing them of their status in that group and giving them
special assignments to reorient their thinking, and
2 - Teaching a clean, virtual assembly language in place of a high
level language

I speculate that 2 could be useful because I can certainly see how
typing "if blah blah" and "while blah blah" inspires beginners to
speculate on additional semantics. High level languages move away from
assembly--which is close to the true language of your
computer--towards English. Maybe I, too, would have had problems if my
first language didn't have line numbers and GOTOs everywhere,
reminding me of the machine nature of my program.

Also, assembly has no = sign or syntax traps. It's basically:
COMMAND arg1, arg2

And I point to using a virtual assembly language because real life
ones tend to be messy and could be distracting to beginners.

-Chuck