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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

#191

Post by tomjen3 »

zerkten wrote: post #184

In the UK during the nineties we had old versions of Delphi distributed on magazine covers. Magazines then carried numerous tutorials over the years that helped people get started on their programming careers when school computing courses had lost their way with a focus on IT. Computing in schools in the UK with the BBC Micro had been much more useful as a basis for learning programming, something Eben Upton called o…

That was exactly how I got my start as a programmer, except in Denmark. It is so hard to understand that today you can download Python, Ruby, Java or anything else you want for nothing, but back then those where a Big Deal.

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

#192

Post by bobochan »

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.

My kids never showed much interest in program despite my encouragement, but this year our high school changed its programming curriculum to follow Harvard's CS50 model:

https://cs50.harvard.edu

The first half of the course is mostly in C and then switches to Python, and I really think it is a very well designed course that get students doing some interesting stuff very quickly while building a solid foundation for future learning. There is an online version of the course and students can watch all of the videos and lectures. I believe there is also a teacher training program for the curriculum.

I was surprised when my son came home and started asking me questions about malloc and free, but he has learned a lot in a very short period of time.

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

#194

Post by Filligree »

kragen wrote: post #97
phendrenad2 wrote: post #39

Professional programmers scoff at "old" languages like this, but they forget what it's like to not know the first thing about programming, or what GCC is, or how it's different from Clang, or if you need to install Linux to use it, or if you're making a huge mistake by using C++ instead of Rust, or if maybe Go is better, or why that one person said something about GraphQL, or if you need to install a virtual env for…

> Professional programmers scoff at "old" languages like this Old languages? Delphi is a lot newer than C. C in a mostly modern form dates from about 1977; Delphi is from 1995. If you want to just write code in a box and have it run, maybe you should use http://sketchpad.cc/ or https://jsfiddle.net/ . Or code.labstack.com, intervue.io, codepad, codiva.io, paiza.io, compilr, ideone, onlinegdb, repl.it, rextester, myco…

> Old languages? Delphi is a lot newer than C. C in a mostly modern form dates from about 1977; Delphi is from 1995.

Oh, I guess you haven't met me. I'm happy to spend hours and hours scoffing at C.

Delphi is actually a pretty good language, though. :P

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

#195

Post by cesarb »

levosmetalo wrote: post #95
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…

Is that somehow wrong? What was so fundamentally changed in CS that makes teaching C obsolete?

> What was so fundamentally changed in CS that makes teaching C obsolete?

It's not C that's obsolete, it's MS-DOS and the 16-bit segmented memory model it uses.

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

#197

Post by perfunctory »

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 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 all they know.

A little bit too harsh. As the article points out Delphi is currently #12 on the TIOBE Index [0]. Above Go for example.

[0] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

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

#198

Post by vintagedave »

perfunctory wrote: post #197
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 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 all they know. A little bit too harsh. As the article points out Delphi is currently #12 on the TIOBE Index [0]. Above Go for example. [0] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

Absolutely too harsh. Remember Pascal was designed to be a learning and teaching language - this purpose is what it was made for.

And Delphi itself was a standout leader in technology, a huge inspiration for C#, and still a key technology used by many people today. It's just not well known. Not well known != ancient.

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

#199

Post by vintagedave »

billfruit wrote: post #186
vladsanchez wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!?

May be one problem might be that it might condition learners to the peculiarities of programming for DOS and its archaic memory model, which aren't that of relevance to modern systems.

Turbo C was a great C compiler. Embarcadero still gives away two (!) free versions of its C/C++ compilers today: the command line tools, and the entire IDE and toolchain in its Community edition.

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder/starter

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

#200

Post by badsectoracula »

billfruit wrote: post #186
vladsanchez wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!?

May be one problem might be that it might condition learners to the peculiarities of programming for DOS and its archaic memory model, which aren't that of relevance to modern systems.

Depends on what sort of stuff they learned - remember that those students knew nothing about C so they'd be learning very simple stuff.

As an example, the free version of Turbo C++ 1.01 that is available through the Borland/Embarcadero museum (or was at some point, i don't know if still is) has ~34 introduction examples (referenced via their guide) that outside of a couple, use only basic stdio and stdlib stuff (these 2-3 examples that use a non-standard header use conio.h which AFAIK is borland specific, though Watcom/OpenWatcom and Visual C++ also seem to provide the used functions) without any DOS-specific functionality (be it far pointers or whatever) and could compile with any modern compiler.

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