Lies in education [was Re: The "loop and a half"]

[Steve D'Aprano]

On Tue, 10 Oct 2017 06:06 am, Stefan Ram wrote:

> In his book about programming, Bjarne Stroustrup writes:
> 
> |We try hard to avoid "white lies"; that is, we refrain from
> |oversimplified explanations that are clear and easy to
> |understand, but not true in the context of real languages and
> |real problems.


Bjarne Stroustrup is famous for designing one of the most heavyweight,
baraque, hard-to-understand, difficult-to-use programming languages in common
use. While C++ has many excellent features, and is constrained by the need to
be compatible with C, I don't think many people believe that it is a
well-designed language.

But even if it were the best language in the world, and Stroustrup the
greatest language designer in the history of computing, what makes you think
that he knows anything about teaching?


-- 
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.