Re: [Sheflug] getting pascal running linux?

[Richard Lowe <nospam [at] btinternet.com>]

* Stephen J. Turnbull (turnbull [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp) wrote:
> >>>>> "Richard" == Richard Lowe <richlowe [at] btinternet.com> writes:
> 
>     Richard> I like the look of ruby, although I've only had a quick
>     Richard> glance.  It seems like a simple language to teach and
>     Richard> learn.  But actually useful.
> 
> ruby is a typical Japanese product.  There's stuff in the object
> system that is just plain ... dangerous[1] if used wrong.  Caveat
> emptor.  So I never bothered to learn it.  Personal preference, not
> really a recommendation against.
>

Most of the mailing lists etc. I could find where japaneses (for obvious
reasons) So the only things I've read are the translations of the
documentation, and the first few pages of Programming Ruby, while I was
in blackwells trying to decide between buying that and the first volume
of The Art of Computer Programming (I chose the latter :))

> However, most users probably won't need that stuff, and the syntax
> does look nicer than Perl.  But it suffers from the Perl "no operation
> is complete until it has at least three syntaxes to express it"
> disease ;-)  I don't know if it would make a very good teaching vehicle.
> 

Being a student still at college, I tend to think of teaching from the
opposite perspective. Now I think about it from the other point of view,
Ruby may not be the best language to teach. but it certainly looks fun
to learn, (although over Pascal, that can be said about just about every
language apart from BASIC), I've been thinking for a while now, that if
people where taught in a language where the was more than one way to
solve a problem correctly. The result would be students writing working
programs, faster. hence being better motivated to learn more about the
language, then in time, their style will improve. (assuming of course
that they have been taught about that as well).

But when I sit in class at the moment, A lot of the people around me are
staring at code that either doesnt work, or works because they've asked
for help, and being told the answer, but have no idea why it works.
IMHO this is far worse than having working programs, In a language such
as Ruby (or Python) that could have been written in a (cant think of the right 
word, not "correct", but more idiomatic) way.

Any way, thats then end of my semi-rant. 

Normal service will be resumed the moment I fix this memory corruption
buglet, and find myself a nice warm source of caffeine :)

> 
> 
> Footnotes: 
> [1]  As Will says, everything is an object.  This is _hard_ to do
> right.  Smalltalk does it right.  Ruby does not.
> 
> -- 
> University of Tsukuba                Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
> Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences       Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
> _________________  _________________  _________________  _________________
> What are those straight lines for?  "XEmacs rules."
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