[Lazarus] Teaching Pascal at College

Lars noreply at z505.com
Fri Oct 21 09:20:09 CEST 2016


On Tue, October 18, 2016 2:11 am, Michael Schnell via Lazarus wrote:
>
>> The big issue with teaching using a RAD tool, is welding the program
>> logic into the onclick events, instead of decoupling the logic in
>> separate procedures that can be reused elsewhere.

> As you point out in the text this is as well a pro (easy fast solving of
> small unitary tasks) as a con (bad reusability, bad code when doing big
> projects)

....

>
> Of course it's great to dedicate a (later) lesson to un-RAD-ing your
> code in order to be prepared for bigger tasks.
>
> -Michael
>

Agree, although one could even just start out teaching console mode
programs before RAD, which I think is what many universities do... I
remember seeing that they were still using turbo pascal in some courses in
Canada at universities here.

The issue with console mode programs is students see utterly no use for
them. I remember when I was using dos as a little kid, I was introduced to
basic, and I saw no use of it. GUI apps are of much more use to people as
they are flashy and rich with widgets, whereas console mode programs seem
utterly boring.

I guess that's the difference between unix users and Windows users.. Unix
users back in the old days saw console mode programs as huge thrills and a
great experience. When I saw Dos programs when I was a kid I thought they
were pathetic and useless, and it deterred me from programming.

If I knew about delphi as a child I probably would have been more
interested in programming.  I remember trying visual basic and disliking
the language keywords. I liked the visual basic tool since you could
easily create widgets on forms, but I disliked the language itself. Visual
basic also forms the exact same (if not worse) bad habits of welding code
into click events and doing sloppy quick coding.


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