[Lazarus] Graeme would love this, or not, I think

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

Reimar Grabowski schrieb:
> On Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:25:25 +0200 Hans-Peter Diettrich
> <DrDiettrich1 at aol.com> wrote:
> 
>> For writing programs you need some editor and an compiler/linker,
>> e.g. a Lazarus IDE which runs on a variety of systems.
> But not as a starting point. As a starting point you should teach C.

NAK

During my studies I've learned about 30 programming languages, and none
was C because it didn't exist at that time. Instead we started with
Algol 60, of which Pascal is a mini-descendant, Simula for OOP, Lisp as
a functional language, APL etc.  Understanding and implementing 
algorithms is not related to a specific language, and C certainly is not 
safe enough for beginners, and has too few data types.

> Plain and vanilla C and not some obscure language like Pascal (these
> are reserved for advanced programmers). Maybe a little object
> oriented programming in C (no C++) and GUI and event driven
> programming in C and multi-platform programming in C, as time
> permits. Most important is not how exactly or on what systems you
> teach students. The most important part is that they know C after the
> course and that people who fail to understand pointers in all their
> beauty fail the course (they would never be good programmers anyway).

C in fact is only a high-level assembler, allowing (or requiring) tricks 
with pointers and other low-level stuff, that are not necessary in 
better equipped languages. It may be useful together with assembler in 
an hardware or OS implementation course.

>  Next thing is Javascript.

You can add any current languages later, after the students have learned 
how to translate algorithms into well structured code.

DoDi