[Lazarus] Teaching Pascal at College

Lars noreply at z505.com
Fri Oct 21 10:12:53 CEST 2016


On Mon, October 17, 2016 3:07 am, Graeme Geldenhuys via Lazarus wrote:
> On 2016-10-17 09:52, Michael Schnell via Lazarus wrote:
>
>> - do I need know how/why the GUI builder creates the code that makes a
>> Button visible on a Form and  my Event handler be called when a button
>> is pressed ?
>
> Yes
>
>
> (I.e. do I need to be able to write the code myself
>
>> without the help of the GUI builder ?)
>
> Yes
>
>
>
>> - do I need to know how the startup code works that make the Form
>> visible on the screen ?
>
> Yes
>
>
>> - do I need to know how the Event-Queue and the checksynchronize()
>> system works ?
>
> If you are using queues and Synchronise, then Yes.
>
>
>
>> - do I need to know what system, calls the pascal program performs ?
>>
>
> No
>
>
>
> The rest of your questions were just flame bait so don't deserve an
> answer.
>
>
> If you don't know any of the above, how do you expect to do any
> debugging? Yes, debugging is a major part of being a programmer.


I can chime in on this flame here. Although debugging is a major part of a
lot of programmers life, it SHOULD NOT be.  We should be developing
applications knowing the entire source code of the application in our
minds, without just knowing little tiny bits of the system and "Winging
it".

Today's bloatware applications are so large no one can understand them
which is what attracts me to systems like Oberon by Nik. Wirth, and
OpenBSD, and other small systems that are simple enough you can understand
them in a month of reading about them (the basics).

Also Plan9 from bell labs... and small programming languages, like oberon,
are very interesting because they go against today's trends of bloatware
like Firefox (as much as I love firefox) and Lisp, or Emacs.

The idea that programmers spend much of their efforts debugging, is a bug,
not a feature. Debugging itself, is a bug in a programmers life, that
should be fixed. I love a small program that I rarely debug that's been
running on a server for years without being touched. I dislike so much
apps that need "maintenance".


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