Why don't you advertise more your language on Quora etc ?

H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Fri Mar 3 09:33:30 PST 2017


On Thu, Mar 02, 2017 at 07:12:07PM -0500, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 03/02/2017 10:32 AM, bachmeier wrote:
> > 
> > I too learned to program using BASIC sometime in the mid-80's. The
> 
> Ditto here (well, late 80's). AppleSoft Basic on Apple IIc.

Ahh, the memories! (And how I am dating myself... but who cares.)  Such
fond memories of evenings spent poring over AppleSoft code trying for
the first time in my life to write programs. And those lovely error
messages with backwards punctuation:

	?SYNTAX ERROR

:-)


[...]
> Back around the height of Java schools, I was a tutor for CS 101
> (Intro to programming, using Java) students at a university around
> here (John Carroll University). There were two instructors who taught
> the course: A prof who'd been teaching it since well before the Java
> craze, and a Java-zealout who was constantly bragging how she'd come
> direct from a real software dev studio and had real-world experience
> with the right way of doing things.
> 
> The two approached their classes very differently:
> 
> The first one, the one who had been teaching code since before Java,
> started out by teaching basic flow-of-execution. "This statement runs,
> then the next one, then the next one." Conditions, loops, functions,
> etc.
> 
> The second teacher, the one who was kneck-deep in the "Java/OOP is our
> god, we must not question" madness that was common in that time
> period...didn't teach it that way. Those students were instead dropped
> straight into object-oriented modeling. Because, of course, OOP is
> "the right way to do everything", as most programmers believed circa
> early 2000's.

I was skeptical of OO, and especially of Java, at the time.  It's odd,
given that I had just been learning C++ in college and was familiar with
OO concepts, but when I saw the way Java pushed for OO to the exclusion
of all else, I balked.  Call me a non-conformist or whatever, but every
time I see too much hype surrounding something, my kneejerk reaction is
to be skeptical of it.  I eschew all bandwagons.


[...]
> So, literally with ZERO exceptions: EVERY student I got from the first
> teacher's class pretty much knew what they were doing and were only
> coming to me for confirmation that they were on the right track.
> Invariably they were. And EVERY (again, zero exceptions) student I got
> from the second teacher's class was *completely* and utterly lost, and
> didn't even have enough grasp of the basics of basics that I was able
> to help them get a working program - at ALL.
> 
> Java definitely had good points (especially compared to the C++ that was so
> predominant before Java stole its thunder), but it also lead to some real
> major blunders and corrupted a lot of minds.

To be fair, though, Java as a language in and of itself is not bad at
all. In fact, in its own way, it's a pretty nicely designed language.
Idealistic, and in some sense approaching perfection. But in an
idealistic bubble-world kind of way (the ugliest parts of Java, IMO, are
where it has to interact with the real world -- but nevertheless, it
isn't *bad* in itself).  The mentality and hype of the community
surrounding it, though, seem to me to have gone off the deep end, and
have bred rabid zealots, sad to say, to this very day, of the kind of
calibre you described above.

(I also TA'd a Java course back in the day, and was quite appalled to
observe the number of thoroughly-confused students who couldn't tell
control flow from OO, because "classes" had been hammered into their
heads long before they even understood what a statement was.
Apparently, imperative statements are non-OO and therefore evil, so one
was supposed to wrap literally everything in classes. Nobody ever
explained how one would implement class methods without using
statements, though.  I suppose calling other class methods was excepted
from the "evil" label, but it seemed to escape people's minds that
eventually nothing would actually get accomplished if all you had was an
infinite regress of calling class methods with no imperative statements
in between. But such was the rabid OO-fanaticism in those days.)


> > Do we have such a thing with D? Unfortunately we are moving in the
> > wrong direction. New users are told to write configuration files for
> > Hello World.
> 
> Lot of truth to that: I'm a big fan of using D instead of bash for
> scripting purposes, and about a couple months ago I found myself
> promoting that approach to a guy who writes a lot of bash scripts and
> python. It was embarrassing to show this as the "hello world" for
> replacing bash scripts with D:

Ha!  Let the rotten tomatoes fly, but I am a skeptic when it comes to
dub (or any other such tool, really -- I mean no offense to Sonke). Sure
they have their place in large software projects with potentially
complicated external dependencies, but for Hello World? C'mon, now.
Whatever happened to just:

	import std.stdio;
	void main() { writeln("Hello world!"); }

And seriously, what kind of koolaid have kids these days been fed, that
they can no longer work with the filesystem, but needs to be spoonfed by
some automated tool? Y'know, we can't just like download scriptlike.d
and put it in a subdir, and then import it. Oh, no, there's no app for
this, and you can't do it by pressing a big red button on your handheld
touchscreen, so it doesn't count. Filesystem? What's that? I only know
of downloading stuff in a browser which magically gets shuffled
somewhere in the "memory" of my device, that automatically gets found
when I need to find it because technology is just that cool.  What's the
filesystem thing you speak of? Download folder? What's that?

Sigh.


T

-- 
Music critic: "That's an imitation fugue!"


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