Re: choosing a teaching language, was Java compiler courses

Marco van de Voort wrote:


> The mere availability of stuff like a form designer is a distraction. This
> goes for e.g. a Delphi too. Turbo Pascal or Topspeed M2/Pascal would be
> better, but the whole cmdline is too alien to the students nowadays.
>
> So IMHO the only decent way is to move to special educational tools.


Having a look at GNU software, I found that writing portable programs
requires the knowledge of about 4 languages, in addition to the
programming language itself. This seems not to matter to Unix people,
which are used to do everything from the cmdline, using vi or emacs as
their "IDE" ;-)


No idea about the preferences of nowadays students, but it might be
*not* a good idea to force them to use a unique language and development
system, be GUI or cmdline, and another one for every parallel course.




> For FPC support I sometimes find myselfe on fairs and seminars, and we get
> a lot of teachers asking for such tools. Unfortunately it is outside the
> direct scope of the project.


FPC is more complete than most Wirth systems, e.g. Wirth refused to
provide an online debugger for Oberon, even if being paid for :-(


But I'm drifting away from the topic...




>>Then do the same for Java, certainly with similar results, and then
>>for Pascal...
>
>
> Assuming you have learned enough languages to understand a superset of these
> languages.


IMO libraries have little in common, across languages. Even if there
exist similarities, the little differences make it hard to use a library
of another language. I'm frequently mixing up Latin, Italian, Spanish
and Portuguese terms and idioms, and similar effects may occur with C++
and Java.


DoDi

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