Subj : Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
To   : tenser
From : poindexter FORTRAN
Date : Sun Jan 07 2024 08:00:00

-=> tenser wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

 te> Honestly, at this point, I can't think of a good reason
 te> to teach C at the collegiate level.  Intro classes should
 te> arguably be in a functional language of some kind; I like
 te> Scheme, but Racket would be better; barring that, OCaml
 te> or even SML would work well.

 It is in much more common use than any of the other languages, so
 having some marketable experience is a good thing.

 te> For low-level details, I'd teach assembler on RISC-V, and
 te> then follow up with Rust or Go; maybe Zig.

I learned assembler on a VAX. Nice instruction set, but we only had a
handful of serial ports for a ton of students. I became a night-owl that
semester, logging on from 2-6am to get my work done.

 te> Things change over time.  Universities used to teach COBOL
 te> to CS students; now they don't.  Pascal was favored for a
 te> time, now it isn't.  Java even made a play for a while.  C
 te> is similar.

My university started a business/CS degree, they learned COBOL, PC
databases and the like. It might have been a more useful degree for me
than my "hard" CS degree.




 te> --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
 te>  * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

.... IN CASE OF EMERGENCY DIAL 0118 999 881 999 119 725 3
--- MultiMail/Win v0.52
 * Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

.