[aklug] Re: tip for learning a new language

On 11/06/2012 02:36 PM, Arthur Corliss wrote:
> On Sun, 4 Nov 2012, Christopher Howard wrote:
>
>
> I not only think that reimplementing UNIX utilities is a great idea, I've
> actually done exactly that when trying to help others learn programming.
>
> The best reason I have for advocating for this approach is because of the
> UNIX philosophy. Most shell utilities do one thing, and do them well.
> Which means your problem domain for the programmer to solve is small and
> well defined. Which subsequently raises the chances of success for that
> programmer.
>
> I've seen many budding would-be programmers get too ambitious out of the
> gate, bite off more than they can chew, and then abandon the dream out of
> frustration. This approach removes most of that risk.
>
> --Arthur Corliss
> Live Free or Die
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Okay, on further reflection, I can see how this could be a good
approach, at least for a beginner course in any of the imperative
languages. It would certainly provided an easy to follow structure for
the class. Of course, you would have to spend the first half of the
semester teaching students what a UNIX utility is, and how to work
inside a shell, but I'm sure we all agree that is a good thing.

I'm not sure if that would be a good approach for every language though;
for example, in Prolog you pretty much have to spend your entire first
semester trying to grasp core theoretical and syntactical concepts -
unification, proof search, recursion, lists, and so forth. And once
you've finally climbed that hill, you'll find that the problems you'll
want to tackle with Prolog are a lot more interesting than trivial file
concatenation or directory listing.

BTW, in my recent effort to learn Prolog, I found this video:

http://youtu.be/hEOVcLAPRG8

It is an half hour introduction to Prolog given by (of all people!) a
Ruby programmer. The explanation of the language is rather imprecise,
but some of the examples given toward the end of solving problems with
Prolog were quite interesting.

-- 
frigidcode.com
indicium.us

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