[Lazarus] Teaching Pascal at College

[Jürgen Hestermann]

Am 2016-10-21 um 11:35 schrieb Lars via Lazarus:
 > There are two sides to this story, I'm afraid. I'm a fan of the console
 > program teaching method myself but the issue is: console mode programs are
 > irrelevant and useless.
 > Today, MS DOS doesn't exist any more. Even when
 > ms dos existed, console mode programs were boring, and only complete geeks
 > would be interested in creating console mode programs. We're talking about
 > people who have no social lives who create text mode games here...

Well, how can you do GUI programming without knowing about variables and loops?
Console mode programs are just a vehicle to introduce these fundamentals.
Nobody can expect to be able to program a block buster game after a one hour programming course.
If students are already bored by not having fun after 10 minutes course
they will not become successful programmers anyway.

And there are useful console mode programs
where you can learn the fundamentals:
I once got a (physical) card game with 9 cards.
Each showed parts of a person with differently colored
arms, legs, heads on top, bottom, left, right.
You had to arrange these cards in 3 rows and 3 columns so that
the whole picture shows all persons with the same
colored bodies on adjacent sides.
This drove me nuts as I did not find out how to arrange them even after days.
So I programmed it (in a console program),
eh voila, all possible solutions were found after 1 or 2 hours of programming.
I think this is a good exercise to learn about the details of a programming language.
And I had fun when doing this (even though it was a console mode program).