Re: OT: helping son of a friend learn programming

Scott Dorsey wrote:

I still think it's good to learn programming the "hard" way using C
or C++ because you know better what the machine is doing, but Java is
probably an acceptable way to go.

If you're going to do that, you might as well just cut out the
middleman and learn assembler. (Which everyone should do at some
point, but probably not as their first experience programming.)

I learned C and assembly language (Z80 and 80x86) almost simultaneously,
though I'd already acquired some rudimentary programming skills with
BASIC and had some introduction to assembly and machine language (as
in hand-assembled programming via a hexadecimal keypad) in school.

I can't even imagine what it must be like for someone trying to work on
a program without having a picture in their mind of what's going on in
terms of a stack, registers, program counter, etc. On the other hand,
sometimes when the problem is beyond some complexity, it's very useful
to be able to look past all of that, and think in terms of the data and
how it's being manipulated, rather than each step the processor is
doing.

I haven't done any assembly programming in well over a decade, though.
I don't really miss it, although there's certainly some satisfaction is
seeing a system go through a finely tuned loop. Mixing monitors, I miss
.... ;-)

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Sylvain Robitaille syl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Systems analyst / AITS Concordia University
Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science Montreal, Quebec, Canada
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