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Message from discussion The gods of FP
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Nick Maclaren  
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 More options Aug 27 2003, 3:39 am
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc, comp.object, comp.arch
From: n...@cus.cam.ac.uk (Nick Maclaren)
Date: 27 Aug 2003 07:39:11 GMT
Local: Wed, Aug 27 2003 3:39 am
Subject: Re: The gods of FP
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In article <3F4C0B10.5030...@austin.rr.com>,
Artie Gold  <artieg...@austin.rr.com> wrote:

>Michael Meissner wrote:
>> "Donald Roby" <dr...@babsoncourt.com> writes:

>>>They weren't teaching programming to 11 years 40 years ago, but I don't
>>>think I would have been surprised by this either.  Even a naive programmer
>>>can grasp that input statements depend on the input.

>> I dunno, I was 15 years old, 32 years ago when I first learned programming on
>> an IBM 1130 with cards, programming in Fortran.  So I could imagine a few 11
>> year olds learning to program 40 years ago.

>Where?

>Other than the fact that I was fourteen, it sounds frighteningly familiar!

>IIRC, there were five or six schools nationally who had been donated
>1130s (8K memory, pizza-sized 270K removable harddrives, _real_ core
>memory, $90,000 a pop) by IBM in 1969 or so.

(a) 1969 is 34 years ago and (b) those would have been used for
senior students.  40 years ago, probably the only 11 year olds taught
programming (and there were some) were taught by academic parents
who were heavily into computing.

>Of course, given the FP in the subject line of this thread, I remember
>my momentary revulsion at seeing the line:

>x = x + 1

>on the chalkboard.

Yeah.  'x <- x+1' was far better (and '<-' was a single character,
remember?) or even 'x := x+1'.

Regards,
Nick Maclaren.


 
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