Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by mbreese » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 2:47 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #171

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…

One reason I could see, based on teaching teenagers programming. They want to build GUI applications and Delphi allows that very easily. Sure C# and Visual Studio makes more sense and they could get everything for free, but maybe Turkey doesn't like/trust Microsoft.

When I was in undergrad taking Data Structures and Algorithms, the course was in C (or C++, I don't remember). But by that time I had already started programming GUIs in Windows (MFC days). It was actually really nice to wire up the base classes and operations for a data structure (push/pop/etc...) and then be able to see the operations working with a GUI. At the time, it was really cool to be able to click a "pop" button and see the head of a queue get removed.

It was even better to visually see various sort algorithms in motion.

So, really, I could see the appeal for that kind of teaching... but I still don't understand using Delphi/Pascal.

(Our first CS class was actually taught with Pascal and that was painful)

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

#182

Post by loxs » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 2:47 PM UTC

vorpalhex wrote: post #170

loxs wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not even talking about big O or algorithms & data structures. I'm talking about the basic concepts of function, iteration, abstraction, indirection etc.

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

#183

Post by adwn » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 2:48 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #151

adwn wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rust [...] everything is web-based Correction: Rust's help and documentation is HTML -based, and getting a local, automatically updated copy is trivial. > even "local" docs launch in a web browser Uh, so what? Can you name a better format for programming language documentation that's also ubiquitously supported?

> Can you name a better format for programming language documentation that's also ubiquitously supported? Info format. It's supported by Emacs, and Emacs is the most ubiquitous of IDE's.

> Info format.

I said "ubiquitously supported". There are several orders of magnitude difference between info format support and HTML support.

> Emacs is the most ubiquitous of IDE's

That's laughably wrong.

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

#184

Post by zerkten » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 2:55 PM UTC

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 out in his Raspberry PI keynote at PyCon a number of years ago.

I recall discussions with other students in my first year of uni about how they learned to program real things for family and businesses with these tools. Native and efficient Win16 and later Win32 (compared to VB runtime) programs were an exciting proposition in the 90s. Delphi could be used to create things that weren't as viable with VB. Personally, I chose C++ Builder for some reason (probably because I had heard about the industry use of C++), but even it had interesting facets, like the VCL compatibility with the Delphi toolset.

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

#185

Post by signal11 » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 2:56 PM UTC

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…

Is it that Pascal is simply popular as a teaching language in Turkey? A bit of googling shows lots of universities offering programming courses in Pascal, e.g. [1]. It is a good pedagogical language after all.

[1] https://www.metu.edu.tr/tr/system/files/2015-2017_general_ca...

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

#186

Post by billfruit » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 2:58 PM UTC

vladsanchez wrote: post #161

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!?

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.

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

#187

Post by billfruit » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

Wiretrip wrote: post #124

blub wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reasonable alternative is Qt, but C++ is more complicated than Pascal. Assuming they would want to try their hand at making money out of what they learn, they could target the kind of companies which were served by VB6 or FoxPro in the past :) Anything web-based is ridiculously complicated and has worse performance.

Actually a very good alternative would be Java and JavaFX, maybe using Eclipse as the IDE.

I would suggest IntelliJ than Eclipse presently.

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

#188

Post by Filligree » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 3:03 PM UTC

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?

I have fond memories of learning Common Lisp in university. They might be fond only because it's something I decided myself, but SLIME was a revelation. However...

Common Lisp lacks a static type checker, or any decent type system. These days I consider that a catastrophically bad design choice, and I can't justify teaching it as anyone's first language. It's also, well, it's design by committee.

Scheme might be better -- at least then you'd be learning about call/cc. If you aren't learning a language purely for work, then I think learning it should teach you something new. Scheme, Rust, Haskell, even Java/Kotlin if you've never used a decent IDE -- all of those can teach you something. CL sort of can't, anymore, though for a long time it could.

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

#189

Post by cesarb » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 3:05 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #84

zozbot234 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QuickBASIC works the same way. Rust doesn't really build its help documentation for "built-in" access in the programming environment (everything is web-based, even "local" docs launch in a web browser) but examples are a first-class feature; they're reused as test cases.

Talking about that, rust html docs gobs a whopping 400MB (2/3 of the install size IIRC). When compressed they're 22MB.

Not long ago, there was support on Firefox to directly open HTML pages within compressed files (through the jar: protocol). If that still existed, it would be an option to distribute the rust HTML docs within a compressed .jar file, and let the browser read directly from it.

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

#190

Post by Filligree » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 3:06 PM UTC

vorpalhex wrote: post #158

fierarul wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The student has to learn programming skills that can teach them the fundamentals quickly, ideally be transferable to most fields and hopefully something they can use freely on their own time. Python is great for this. You can have kids building whatever in class and they can go home and use the same tools and make videogames or visual novels or whatever else strikes their fancy, and when they get hired still use the…

> My main issue with haskell is that it's likely not very transferable.

I thought this for a long time, having taught myself Haskell in university. I never regretted it, but I'll admit I never thought of it as a practical choice either.

Then I ran into Rust, and found I was somewhat mistaken. ;-)