On 12/12/06, Brian Hulley
Kirsten Chevalier wrote:
since it's not as if anyone programs in Pascal anymore.
Yet I'm sure most people who did a computer science degree some decades ago remember the old joke about passing things by name or value for what it's Wirth... :-)
I was kidding slightly. My first programming language was Pascal, but I guess I should be grateful that I didn't take the same course a year later, because then my first language would have been Java. In fact, a comment from Lyn Turbak, who taught the second-semester computer science class I took at Wellesley, is in some sense or another half of the reason why I'm participating in this discussion today -- a student (not me) asked him, "why are we learning Pascal if you hate the language so much?" and he explained, "Historical accident..." and talked about the reasons why Pascal ended up being a popular teaching language. Much later, I'm amazed at how few students ask this kind of question and how few teachers talk about the answers to them. I think this relates back to the point of the original discussion. People (except people on this mailing list, and a few similar fora) don't talk much about the reasons for choosing programming languages. When they do talk about it, it's usually very prescriptively oriented rather than descriptively oriented. I think that it would serve this community well if somebody was able to achieve a better understanding of the social reasons why some programming languages are adopted and some aren't. I think all of us already know that the reason isn't "because some are better than others," but it might be time for someone to go beyond that. Cheers, Kirsten -- Kirsten Chevalier* chevalier@alum.wellesley.edu *Often in error, never in doubt "THEY CAN KILL YOU, BUT THE LEGALITIES OF EATING YOU ARE QUITE A BIT DICIER" --David Foster Wallace