[IAEP] Which Language?

[DancesWithCars]

I also did some Fortran,
IBM 360 Assembler (failed that one?)

Basic was very painful, as had better elsewhere,
but did a little project in HS with it, iirc.

A local kid has [obsconded with] my Scratch cards,
but I've got his stuffed penguin as collateral...

'Insanity is inherited, you get it from your kids',
and teachers have so many kids,
so they must be very very insane... ;-/

Jerry aka dwc

On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 2:24 AM, Caryl Bigenho <cbigenho at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the input Gary.  I followed a similar path.. Fortran and Basic,
> then Pascal, then I left the classroom to become a "college counselor" at
> the high school I was teaching at. Haven't done much programming since.
> Alas!  Tried Scratch this summer... it's a lot of fun.
>
> Caryl
>
>> Date: Sat, 26 Sep 2009 01:35:59 -0400
>> Subject: Re: [IAEP] Which Language?
>> From: danceswithcars at gmail.com
>> To: gary at garycmartin.com
>> CC: cbigenho at hotmail.com; iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org;
>> support-gang at laptop.org
>>
>> For a college level class, starting with Python
>> (as most Activities are probably Python, and
>> Sugar seems to be implemented in it),
>> but will probably drop into C (kernel and other linux
>> plus application stuff).
>>
>> But Scratch, EToys, Emacs, etc provide some
>> other languages under the hood (even if in another
>> name)...
>>
>> So far the documentation for the languages
>> is lacking, like finding PIL, etc. So they may
>> need to create a documentation addon,
>> as even pydoc is crashing for me...
>>
>> Back in my day it was Pascal, then C,
>> then Java (had to do it myself as a thesis),
>> but I'd already started with SAIL, ALGOL,
>> DEC-10, etc as the first pre-PCs
>> were coming out..
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 12:33 AM, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com>
>> wrote:
>> > Hi Caryl,
>> >
>> > On 26 Sep 2009, at 05:00, Caryl Bigenho wrote:
>> >
>> >> On Thursday, Ben wrote in the IAEP list:
>> >>
>> >> "My feeling is that the most important thing we can do in this area
>> >> is to
>> >> make it easy to write Activities that are intrinsically cross-
>> >> platform.
>> >> To borrow a phrase, one way to do this is to choose languages, and
>> >> interpreters, that are incapable of expressing platform dependencies."
>> >>
>> >> So I have a question for you folks. I am in discussion with a
>> >> college CS prof who
>> >> would like to teach beginning programming with XOs. He is interested
>> >> in trying
>> >> several different languages, but I am interested in pointing him
>> >> toward the one
>> >> that would result in the most universally usable Activities with the
>> >> idea that
>> >> his students would be able to write Activities as class projects
>> >> that could then
>> >> be widely distributed.
>> >>
>> >> It would be great if they would be, as Ben suggests, cross-platform.
>> >> By that, I mean
>> >> usable on the XO-1, XO-1.5, SoaS, live CD, etc. for PCs and Intel
>> >> Macs. Of course my
>> >> dream ideal is that they would also be able to be run on the old
>> >> PowerPC Macs that
>> >> are still widely used in the public schools, but that is probably
>> >> too much too hope for.
>> >>
>> >> So...the question is, what should I tell him?
>> >
>> > Python.
>> >
>> > Regards,
>> > --Gary
>> >
>> > P.S. I can provide more ifs and buts, if you really want, but given
>> > the lengths and distractions of some recent threads, I thought I'd
>> > just give you the answer, straight up ;-)
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
>> > IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
>> > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> DancesWithCars
>> leave the wolves behind ;-)
>



-- 
DancesWithCars
leave the wolves behind ;-)