CP4E was Re: Deitel and Deitel Book...

[David C. Ullrich]

On Wed, 06 Mar 2002 09:12:09 -0500, Ramkumar Kashyap
<rkashyap at sympatico.ca> wrote:

>I find that most introductory books approach programming in a 
>non-intuitive manner and lose out on a big chunk of their audience. 
> Only a few of us that persevere, end up learning the language and even 
>fewer go on to achieve "GURU" status. Why is this?
>
>I have seen several posts on CLP and the newbie tutors list, where 
>people mention that their first encounter with programming was in BASIC, 
>COBOL, Pascal, Fortran.  They did not really make any progress, gave up 
>on programming.  Now they are attempting once again, hoping things have 
>become a little easier.
>
>I would like to know how the pattern was set to teach programming 
>languages.  You do an introductory program like "Hello World", learn how 
>to compile and run it. Then jump into decision structures, loops, 
>functions, etc.
>
>This is extremely non-intuitive to most people.  Most 5,6,7 year olds 
>can speak fluently in their native languages, but how many of them could 
>tell you about vowels, consonants, nouns, verbs, adjectives.  In fact 
>quite a few of them speak multiple languages, can easily differentiate 
>sentence structures in those languages, but would be hard-pressed to 
>give defintions of the above.
>
>So how come in programming, we ALWAYS jump into the constructs of a 
>language, rather than just doing, gaining proficiency and then 
>understanding how it is put together?

Because a child can make himself understood even though he's speaking
with atrocious grammar, while invalid code doesn't do anything but
generate an error message?

>I think that unless the approach to teaching Programming languages, is 
>changed and follows the more universal style of teaching spoke language 
>or verbal communication, Computer Programming for Everybody will remain 
>a dream.



David C. Ullrich