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Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

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Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#61

Post by devpts11 »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #36
arghwhat wrote: post #14

This reminds me of a few ( I then found out that they were being taught to use Borland Turbo C . I suspect the case for this is similar: Some person who once upon a time learnt to program and then never practiced nor developed their skills somehow got a job teaching programming, and is now trying to apply the ancient tools they were taught somewhere around the time when some fish decided to walk on land because its a…

Borland C and Pascal were great for learning programming in mid-90s, because of one crucial feature: an immensely good built in help reference. Whenever you wanted to know syntax of some command, you print this command, press ctrl-f1 and is presented with docs, complete with a working example . It was insanely great. Remember, stack overflow didn't exist then.

Stack Overflow has dumbed people down significantly because of the mental laziness it engenders.

In a time before the internet, it used to be that books, and occasionally magazines, were the initial entry points to understanding software, hardware and electronics. Then the BBS came along, these secret islands of knowledge and trade.

I learned Pascal and assembly on Turbo Pascal with trial-and-error and lots of context-sensitive help. These days, development is mostly fragmented and half-working. Progress is neither linear, increasing nor assured, and much is lost, reinvented not necessarily as well and lost again.

Also, eventually coding will decline or bifurcate more because general AI will allow non-programmers to ask a machine to do Star Trek-like self-programming. Essentially all office jobs are vulnerable to elimination as mechanical machine operators.

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#62

Post by krembo »

devpts11 wrote: post #61
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Borland C and Pascal were great for learning programming in mid-90s, because of one crucial feature: an immensely good built in help reference. Whenever you wanted to know syntax of some command, you print this command, press ctrl-f1 and is presented with docs, complete with a working example . It was insanely great. Remember, stack overflow didn't exist then.

Stack Overflow has dumbed people down significantly because of the mental laziness it engenders. In a time before the internet, it used to be that books, and occasionally magazines, were the initial entry points to understanding software, hardware and electronics. Then the BBS came along, these secret islands of knowledge and trade. I learned Pascal and assembly on Turbo Pascal with trial-and-error and lots of contex…

"Stack Overflow has dumbed people down significantly because of the mental laziness it engenders." +1 for this

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#63

Post by p2detar »

Dolores12 wrote: post #43
h4l0 wrote: post #9

I really don't want to sound cynical about this great initiative(!) but it saddens me that among many open modern languages and tools, they instead opted for Delphi. I cannot think of a single positive reason behind this decision in 2020. All I can think of is that the people that came to this conclusion are the ones who graduated from Computer Science related studies in ~1998-2004~ and immediately got themselves in…

All modern tools are really complicated compared to Delphi. I remember Delphi was so intuitive to design GUI and program its events so i could start making my own programs right after professor showed me how to make a button and handle onClick event.

Well, in all fairness, the same can be said about Visual Basic and all the .NET languages. And I'm not even a Windows programmer.

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#64

Post by Nullabillity »

_lbaq wrote: post #4
Nullabillity wrote: post #2

Next up: COBOL?

There is nothing wrong Delphi, other than it's largely a niche language

It's a commercial product. Why on earth would you teach the kids something that they won't be able to use afterwards, when there are plenty of alternatives without that constraint?

It's like teaching kids to use Office, without even having the ubiquity argument.

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#65

Post by _lbaq »

Nullabillity wrote: post #64
_lbaq wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing wrong Delphi, other than it's largely a niche language

It's a commercial product. Why on earth would you teach the kids something that they won't be able to use afterwards, when there are plenty of alternatives without that constraint? It's like teaching kids to use Office, without even having the ubiquity argument.

It's about the logic, not so much about the syntax. And the office comparison is not valid, knowing Office is for many a very valuable skill.

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#67

Post by rytis »

h4l0 wrote: post #31
arghwhat wrote: post #14

This reminds me of a few ( I then found out that they were being taught to use Borland Turbo C . I suspect the case for this is similar: Some person who once upon a time learnt to program and then never practiced nor developed their skills somehow got a job teaching programming, and is now trying to apply the ancient tools they were taught somewhere around the time when some fish decided to walk on land because its a…

and think that they actually didn't get a job at teaching programming but they involved in politics and appointed as "Minister of Technology" for their "loyalty" to the Head of State. That's what Turkey is dealing with right now. 5 or 6 years ago, our ex-minister, claimed that it is dangerous to work with computers since they can be challenging for the mind in a conference about cloud computing. Let that sink in.

Sounds similar to how cybernetics was "seen" in USSR (early years): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics_in_the_Soviet_Unio...

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#68

Post by arghwhat »

devpts11 wrote: post #61
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Borland C and Pascal were great for learning programming in mid-90s, because of one crucial feature: an immensely good built in help reference. Whenever you wanted to know syntax of some command, you print this command, press ctrl-f1 and is presented with docs, complete with a working example . It was insanely great. Remember, stack overflow didn't exist then.

Stack Overflow has dumbed people down significantly because of the mental laziness it engenders. In a time before the internet, it used to be that books, and occasionally magazines, were the initial entry points to understanding software, hardware and electronics. Then the BBS came along, these secret islands of knowledge and trade. I learned Pascal and assembly on Turbo Pascal with trial-and-error and lots of contex…

I would argue that StackOverflow itself is not a problem—it is instead the laziness of many in the "newer" generations of programmers.

StackOverflow has many great explanations, which are no different than reading a chapter in a book (it's just a book that is extremely relevant to you problem).

The problem is that lazy people demand code dumps, and lazy people provide code dumps instead of explanations. This then becomes a feedback loop as people get used to this degree of laziness.

This is especially rampant for Web topics, and to some extend also a counter-argument to the Borland help pages with examples: When presented with a fully written solution, people will blindly copy it and only do the minimum amount of work to make it run.

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#70

Post by non-entity »

revanx_ wrote: post #30

I programmed in Delphi for 8 years, then I switched to FreePascal. Yes, the grass is greener on the other side, and it's also free.

Going to start a project in in FreePascal soon because it seems to be the only [not abandonware] compiler for a high level language that still supports targeting 8086.
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