Re: Oberon/CP as first language

From: [at]} <Bob>
Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2004 22:51:14 +0000

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Hi John,

> I have great hopes of this and only hope I'm not doing my students a
> disservice when they go for a job interview and the reaction to Oberon is
> 'What?'

You may need to teach your students to hide their light under a
bushel, but knowing Oberon will be of great benefit, even if they can't
use it directly. It should at least provide a sound reference model
and yardstick against which to measure everything else they meet. But
if their future colleagues have not been educated to the same standard
they will find themselves frustrated and held back by other people.

My own experience bears this out, to some extent. I learnt to program
in 1981 on a 3-month government-sponsored training course. The main
language was COBOL, with a week's BASIC at the end. I was lucky enough
to have a very good teacher who taught Jackson Structured Programming,
and used a pseudo-code based on Pascal. Within a day of learning JSP &
'sort of Pascal' I found myself thinking 'What is the point of COBOL?'.
Still, I earned a living with it.

I was doubly lucky in getting a job working on ICL 29-series
mainframes, which had a Pascal-like script language, SCL. So when PCs
started to become widely used I naturally looked for a similar
language.

My 3rd piece of luck was working with someone who'd heard of Modula-2,
which he recommended, and I adopted.

I have used Wirth's languages ever since, although never on a professional
basis, unfortunately. In my professional life I've always had to use
dross. But the direction that Wirth's languages led me in has made me
a much better software developer than I would otherwise have been,
even though it has often led to difficulties when colleagues have not
had a similar (mostly self-)education in computer science and software
engineering.

D L Parnas wrote in one of his essays how shocked he was when he first
worked in industry. He considered the methods used 'primitive'. Plus
ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

-- 
Regards,
 Bob
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Received on Mon Feb 09 2004 - 23:51:14 UTC