Botted Piography of my COSC years (Re: Why aren't we all speaking LISP now?)

[Greg Ewing]

Laura Creighton wrote:
> 
> What sort of teaching did the rest of you that took computer science
> courses get?

My undergraduate COSC years were in the early 1980s at
Canterbury University. I had a bit of a head start, my
earlier hobby activities having exposed me to some 8-bit
micro machine languages, Applesoft Basic, and a little
Pascal.

There were two courses in the first year. One was
essentially an introduction to programming in Pascal,
and as far as I remember it was pretty thorough and
reasonably gentle. In the other, we did some assembly
language programming for a simulated computer that
was a bit like an emasculated PDP-11 (I would have
loved to program the real PDP-11 that it was emulated
on, but that wasn't an option), and learned some basic
data structure stuff (linked lists, etc) in Pascal.
All this was done on a batch-processing system that
I found distinctly uninspiring to use.

Nothing in the first year was very mind-bending at
all. Nevertheless, I feel that most of what I knew
about programming and computers by the end of it
was developed from massive amounts of extracurricular 
activity. Someone who did nothing but attend the
lectures and do the assignments would have been
ill-prepared for subsequent years.

In the second year we got into the traditional hard-
core computer science stuff (searching and sorting,
parsing and compiling, graph algorithms, etc. etc.)
mostly using Pascal.  Exposed to some other
languages, including Fortran, Cobol and Snobol (the
latter being quite interesting!) You were definitely
expected to be able to program by now -- anyone who
couldn't would have really been struggling. 

We got to use a more pleasant computer system -- could
actually run our programs interactively -- what
fun! Got to program a real machine in assembly language
at last (Prime 750 in 32I mode, if that means anything
to anyone). Mind expanded considerably that year, although
not really bent, except maybe by some of the parsing
stuff (I'm pretty sure I know *how* an LR parser
works, but I'm not sure I really understand *why*
it works!)

Can't remember exactly what happened in the third
year. More of the same sort of stuff. There was some
stuff about databases in there somewhere.

The fourth (honours) year was when things started to
get *really* interesting. Besides getting exposed to
lots of interesting ideas and languages (Prolog,
Smalltalk, Lisp, Scheme, functional languages) our
department acquired a VAX Unix system. Previously,
all our computer usage had been strictly accounted for
and rationed, but now suddenly we had a powerful
machine that we could use interactively as much as
we wanted! I was in heaven!

My extracurricular computing really took off at that
point, and I've never looked back. I discovered Lisp
(or re-discovered it; I had read a book about it
earlier, but didn't really see the point of it until
I had a chance to actually play with it, then found
that I really liked it). Then I discovered Scheme,
which blew Lisp out of the water, and, to answer
the question originally posed, is the reason I'm not 
speaking Lisp now.

The reason I'm not speaking *Scheme* now is because
I discovered Python! But that wasn't until much later --
Scheme was my Favourite Cool Language for quite a few
years.

Anyway, this seems to have gotten rather long. To
sum it all up, I'd say that the COSC courses I took
did assume, for the most part, that you would take
responsibility yourself for acquiring the skill of
programming -- although probably less harshly than
at places like MIT.

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, University of Canterbury,	  
Christchurch, New Zealand
To get my email address, please visit my web page:	  
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg