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
.