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1. Biason::Julio::new(); (juliobiason@functional.cafe)'s status on Friday, 11-Mar-2022 14:21:11 UTC Biason::Julio::new();

   You know, I'm starting to wonder if teaching an structured language as first language in the uni is actually a good idea.

   I see a lot of people with problems with loops and I can clearly see that if they used, for example, BASIC (the old BASIC, with line numbers), the conversion from description to code would make a lot more sense.

   ... and then you can explain how to do that old loop with GOTO using whiles, fors and whatnot.

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   • janbittner@digitalcourage.social's status on Friday, 11-Mar-2022 14:21:08 UTC JanBittner

     in reply to

     @juliobiason Interesting point of view considering that most modern languages strictly forbid gotos (for a good reason). I see that cs students profit from a low level first language. I started with Java and i really had no idea what was going on and how the machine would do anything. Later, learning C helped a ton. Java also has OOP which is double confusing for anyone new to programming.

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   • Biason::Julio::new(); (juliobiason@functional.cafe)'s status on Friday, 11-Mar-2022 14:21:09 UTC Biason::Julio::new();

     in reply to

     • JanBittner

     @JanBittner It's because you would describe a problem like:

     1. Ask the user a score.
     2. If the score is below 0 or above 10, ask it again (goto 1)
     3. Show if the user passed or not.

     This is almost BASIC code (sure, there should be a print, an input, and a lot more of upcase characters), and you can see the loop there, with the goto -- which is also the description of the problem.

     Maybe it is my own experience: GOTOs were the only looping technique I had when I started learning to code, and loops and fors and everything else were things that I got almost immediately.

   • janbittner@digitalcourage.social's status on Friday, 11-Mar-2022 14:21:10 UTC JanBittner

     in reply to

     @juliobiason How would basic be easier with loops?

   • Vertigo #$FF (vertigo@hackers.town)'s status on Friday, 11-Mar-2022 14:21:36 UTC Vertigo #$FF

     in reply to

     @juliobiason I've been saying this for decades now. Djikstra was straight-up wrong on this one.

     While I'm not a professional educator, I have given talks about best practices for programming over my career, and I've found that teaching people low-level programming first (for example, assembly language) and letting them experience the pain of trying to scale that process up gives the right foundation and motivation to introduce higher-level languages and, more importantly, the concepts that they introduced at the time.

     I'm a big proponent of this. If you go the opposite direction, you get ... waves hand around current software landscape this.

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   • Mek101 (mek101@mstdn.io)'s status on Friday, 11-Mar-2022 14:23:20 UTC Mek101

     in reply to

     • Vertigo #$FF

     @vertigo @juliobiason "this"?

   • Chrisshy Keygen (rgegriff@mastodon.lol)'s status on Friday, 11-Mar-2022 14:28:18 UTC Chrisshy Keygen

     in reply to

     • Vertigo #$FF

     @vertigo @juliobiason I have always had a hunch that math should be taught in a similar way; which is to say, archaeologically. Teach math in the order that humanity learned it and I think a lot more people would have a firmer grasp as things get more and more abstract and symbolic.

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   • Csepp 🩸 (csepp@merveilles.town)'s status on Friday, 11-Mar-2022 14:28:18 UTC Csepp 🩸

     in reply to

     • Vertigo #$FF
     • Chrisshy Keygen

     @rgegriff @vertigo @juliobiason It's really irritating when in math you aren't taught how results were arrived at, and then are tasked with proving something on an exam.

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