/Sorry, a looong message./ Le 16/03/2017 à 23:38, Brandon Allbery a écrit :
programs are best written for clarity; the *compiler* should be optimizing, not the programmer, whenever possible.
A historical anecdote... When something called 'cybernetics' ceased to be in the Soviet Union a bourgeois pseudo-science whose aim was to enslave the the Class of Workers, etc., and Russians and their satellites began to manufacture computers, they managed quite fast to master the main idea of interesting algorithms, exquisite data structures and their processing. They COULD have invented some nice programming languages (we are at the end of '50-ties...), but among many other calamities, their forerunners said that they had some wonderful teams of very competent mathematicians, who, once instructed how to program computers, would do Wonders, in the name of the True Proletarian Science. It was partly true (mathematicians, Andrey Markov Jr., Andrey Ershov, etc., not necessarily the Proletarian Science...) . So, when the ideal personage of THE Programmer became in US a cliché in some science-fiction books (e.g., Asimov's), in the world of the True Proletarian Science, very decent humans wasted a horrible amont of time producing low-level codes, and neglecting completely the domain of compilation... They managed to put Sputnik and Gagarin above our heads, but programming languages did not evolve... [[Although the Snobol language invented by Ralph Griswold, was partly based on the Markov algorithm concept]]. Now, the morale of this story?... Wait a bit. Second round. There is a pedagogical initiative, called the International Olympiad in Informatics. ( http://www.ioinformatics.org/index.shtml ). The evolution of this contest, participating countries, etc., is a very interesting story, but here I want just to tell you something different. In Wikipedia you will read that/*it is an annual competitive programming competition for secondary school students. It is the second largest olympiad, after International Mathematical Olympiad *//* *//*The contest consists of two days of computer programming and problem-solving of algorithmic nature. To deal with problems involving very large amounts of data, it is necessary to have not only programmers, "but also creative coders, who can dream up what it is that the programmers need to tell the computer to do. The hard part isn't the programming, but the mathematics underneath it.... " */Nice. And now: the TRUTH.*The only languages which are permitted are C, C++, and Java*. Sorry, recently also Pascal, the Eastern Europe insisted upon it. I looked through the proposed tasks. A good percentage of them were puzzles of logical kind. But no logical languages were allowed. Something which can be coded in 12 lines of CLP, has to be ceeplusjavaised on 8 pages, and the Jury acknowledges the speed and efficiency of such programs... Laugh or weep?... Functional languages? Anybody heard of them?... Don't blame the Soviets, please... Look up the *British Informatics Olympiad*. The rules I found randomly for the 2000 contest stipulated: /*"The languages available will be Turbo Pascal and Turbo C/C++." */Yes, not just C++, but compulsory Borland dialect. More? Let's see the *ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest*. Rules: /*"... They must submit solutions as programs in C, C++, Java or Python (although it is not guaranteed every problem is solvable in Python)." */(Most probably the author doesn't know what Python is...) This is the way we teach our youth to be creative ! In such a way we inspire them to became "creative coders". You may think whatever you wish, but I am convinced that the best part of the responsibility for such a calamitous picture of the CS pedagogy, falls upon those feeble-minded "professionals" who know better what is good, what is the "main stream" which should be promoted, and what is "wrong", which should be severely punished. The totalitarian (or fundamentalist) doctrines are everywhere. Let's build some more huge screening walls, and forbid the presence of people who think otherwise, and we shall be Great Again. Jerzy Karczmarczuk /Caen, France/ /* */ --- L'absence de virus dans ce courrier électronique a été vérifiée par le logiciel antivirus Avast. https://www.avast.com/antivirus