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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

#161

Post by vladsanchez »

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…

What's the problem with it? Programming snob? Isn't it still C programming after all? I don't understand the problem with people bashing Borland after all these years! Didn't you know that the accomplished Mr Anders Hejlsberg was behind Borland (TurboPascal and Delphi), before he was appointed to develop Microsoft C# and Typescript? So, what's the/your problem!?

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

#162

Post by neves »

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.

They also were quick compilers and fit in a floppy.

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

#163

Post by vorpalhex »

tristador wrote: post #92
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…

I've been toying with the idea of running a few classes to help early and mid-career adults learn to program. Although it's been so long since I first learned that I worry I'd struggle to get the basics across. Does anyone have a recommendation for a good, up to date, open source, introduction to programming? Ideally something that uses an experienced programmer (i.e. me) to guide.

I like the "X by Example" books from O'Reilly in whatever your desired language is. Not exactly open source but quick to learn practical programming which is probably what you're after with adults.

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

#164

Post by throwawayhhakdl »

fierarul wrote: post #152
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…

What does it matter which programming language they learn in high school? It's not supposed to be the language you use for work. It's supposed to teach you to program. If anything it should be mandatory to learn something else. It might be the only non-work programming language they will ever learn. Cradle to grave Python / Java? Would Common Lisp / Haskell be considered a bad / good / ancient choice?

Matlab and a variety of other paid languages think otherwise

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

#166

Post by YAFZ »

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.

Turbo C++ documentation was legendary, with a healthy dose of humor! https://everything2.com/title/7+hertz+-+the+resonant+frequen...

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

#167

Post by jstimpfle »

Wiretrip wrote: post #123
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…

Positive reasons: 1) It runs out of the box without and Internet ocnnection. 2) The IDE is extremely good. 3) It teaches OOP and memory management (something often forgotten by today's programmers). 4) It is capable of giving very low level access to the host machine (like C). 5) You can even use (and teach) tricky things like pointers.

TBH, I found the low-level pointer stuff to be inaccessible. There is so much magic going on behind the scenes, and on the other hand it's hard to do pointer value arithmetic as well as pointer type arithmetic (you need to create aliases to no end). C is much more convenient for dealing with pointers, and it makes it much more obvious what happens from reading the code.

In Delphi culture, people say PChar instead of char* , and make tons of PFoo and PPFoo. And I think the reason is that some syntactical restrictions made Pascal easier to implement back in its time (last I checked there were still significant restrictions in Delphi)

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

#168

Post by goatinaboat »

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…

A classic, time-tested pedagogical approach that makes it easy for a student to reason about what the hardware is doing to execute their code... or a flavour-of-the-month JS “framework” that is impossible to reason about and really will be obsolete before the end of term? Hmm tricky.

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

#169

Post by poloniculmov »

blub wrote: post #118
oefrha wrote: post #21

I too have a soft spot for Object Pascal but > Getting object-pascal back into universities and education is very important. Not just for Delphi as a product and Embarcadero as a company, but to ensure that the next generation of software developers are given a firm grasp on fundamental programming concepts; concepts that represent the building-blocks that all software rests on; a curriculum that has taken heavy dama…

Java and C# are a morass of complexity. There is no job or project where you just use the language Java/C#, you have to pull their immense libraries and frameworks in too. On the other hand Delphi's just Delphi. That's quite refreshing in a world where everything depends on everything else.

>On the other hand Delphi's just Delphi

is this true today? Back in the day it was Delphi + JediVCL + JediCL + plus lots of other different components that looked better than bundled ones. Does it have a package manager or you still need to install a bunch of EXEs?

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

#170

Post by vorpalhex »

loxs wrote: post #99
tristador wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been toying with the idea of running a few classes to help early and mid-career adults learn to program. Although it's been so long since I first learned that I worry I'd struggle to get the basics across. Does anyone have a recommendation for a good, up to date, open source, introduction to programming? Ideally something that uses an experienced programmer (i.e. me) to guide.

In my experience, it's close to impossible (or maybe even totally impossible) to get the basics across. I have been trying with many non-programmers for years and I have followed many people who tried to become programmers. At this point I think it's probably a matter of "you either have it, or you don't". All of the people who succeeded "already knew" how to program, before I even showed them, or they never managed…

The truth is what many of us consider to be basics - big O notation, b-trees, so on are not really needed by the average programmer. They might be useful (I get use from them) but they're not necessary.

Likewise, getting into intimate discussions on file encoding or strings in memory just isn't going to be retained by someone whose major interaction with a computer is facebook.

Focus on practical tasks, but take time to explain what code is doing in plain english. If you've done rubber duck debugging, you're aiming for that level of simplicity in your explanation. Avoid technical words, use simple metaphors and generally avoid the history lessons. Once you establish a baseline of skill in the developing programmer, swap the roles - have them explain their code to you.

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