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Re: [SLUG] operating systems and schools
On Tue, Feb 01, 2000 at 11:08:32PM +1000, Alexander Else wrote:
> At 22:37 01/02/2000 +1100, Terry Collins wrote:
> >Umm, is it just me late at night, or is this a bit oxymoronic?
> >Don't do anything new, because we have such an investment in the
> >existing system and someone might be inconvenience.
>
> Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. I am by no means saying that we
> shouldn't do anything new. What I am saying is that we shouldn't do
> something just because it is new. There is an established base of
> companies that use VB programs, there is a need for people to support them.
> To remove this need yes you could recode everything under a different
> os/language/whatever. Is this expense, inconvenience, stress all
> justified? ie. are you really going to gain anything by recoding the same
> application from scratch?
I had the impression from the original message that the schools
were paying for VB licences whether the computer was used as a VB
development platform or not. That sounds like a waste.
If that's not the case, and the VB is actually being used for
teaching, then that's more supportable, but your argument isn't a
convincing one. The present needs of industry should have bugger-all
influence on the curriculum at high school, where the emphasis
should be on education of principles and learning techniques, rather
than specific systems. If you want specific systems, you can get
that from TAFE.
I started programming with Microsoft Basic on a TRS-80. I think
the whole computer probably cost less than the quoted price of that
VB licence. I suppose that VB is unlikely to be a _worse_ environment
than the Basic I learned. I consider myself to have recovered from
the experience now. At least its shortcomings encouraged me to
get into assembly-language programming, which taught me a lot about
how computers _really_ work.
> Remember that my argument was in response to someone saying effectively
> (paraphrasing here) "why pay for VB when linux has a good development
> environment?". My response can be summed up with "Because the gain is
> often far outweighed by the expense".
But what is the gain of using VB to teach at high schools? Short
term familiarity with a soon-to-be out of date version of a niche
proprietary product. The emphasis should be on teaching principles
of programming. At some level, BASIC is OK for that. Any BASIC.
There are BASIC interpreters available for Linux. You'd probably
do just as well to start with Python, or Octave (a matlab clone)
though.
--
Andrew
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