-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: AKFAvatar Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2007 22:53:46 +0200 From: marcov@stack.nl (Marco van de Voort) To: Adriaan van Os gpc@microbizz.nl References: 20070814101911.GA5425@castrophe.akfoerster.de 46C3FF48.50100@microbizz.nl

In gmane.comp.compilers.gpc, you wrote:

...

your program to use my library. (The program may not use the CRT unit or any other nonstandard output facility)

The same mistake was made in teaching mathematics the-modern-way, with much graphics and much less exact reasoning nor proofs-of-correctness. Well, indeed in a democratic society the Pythogorean Theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem should no longer be proofed, which is dictatorial, or even be thought about, which is elitarian, but decided on by voting ....

This is all bullsh..., I mean nonsense. Programming, like mathematics, *is* about exact reasoning and it *is* about abstract thinking. The task of teachers is to lead pupils into this new world and to bring young people to spiritual maturity. It is *not* the task of teachers to succumb to the first shallow prejuduce, like whether something yet unknown is "boring" or not.

I talked a bit with teachers on the FPC booth at Systems 2005, and I got a different feeling;

Teachers have had a love for the consoles tools because their simplicity somewhat put a brake on the time being spent in e.g. form designers making blinkenlightes with buttons and the like. (and because they are generally too lazy to re-setup their courses) However slowly that is becoming a problem because current students seem to miss any feel for the textconsole at all, having never used Dos. It is simply not a common skill anymore.

And yes, that is not a really hard skill to teach, but every course day lost also detracts from the real objective of the course.

The consensus seemed to be that a simple IDE maybe integrated with a lib to do some minimal work (few textfields/memo's input, a few output ones) would be the best.

IOW one should separate "old and simple" and the real issue "can't be abused" here.

Anyway, TP is probably still too free for a CS practicum, though the skills to exploit it may have decreased in new students A cut down compiler,IDE and lib that can't do anything communicating with the outside world except this special lib would be best.

So one of the open source compilers, cut down and an IDE (Bloodshed?). Main problem probably: the debugger.