[OrangeBlossomBaby]

Originally Posted by biker1

No, they don't. If you actually knew anything at all about computer science you would never state such a thing. There is a big difference between playing around with Windows and doing real, mission critical work on real computers. And I am pretty sure you have never used a real computer.

I was programming on a dummy terminal connected to a teletype machine with tickertape, and three huge "refrigerator-case" computers in another room that had reel-to-reel tapes for memory. That was in 1978, in high school. I was disqualified from taking algebra II because I got a D in algebra I. My choices for senior math class were re-taking algebra I and then summer school for algebra II, or computer programming. My options were BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN, or PASCAL. I took BASIC.

There was no Windows, no DOS, no PCs. Just clickety-click with black screen, amber text, we mapped out our programs on paper with plastic templates before entering them into the computer, the insane but always entertaining divide by zero error, and the equally entertaining "goto" function.

[raananh]

Originally Posted by biker1

I don't think it is really valid to say the colleges once taught programming languages. What was really being taught was data structures, algorithms, etc. and you learned these concepts typically through programming assignments....

I was a professor reaching computer science at college. Personally I did not teach programming-languages, but other professors did.

Programming languages like Assembler, Fortran, Pascal, Cobol, C, etc were taught in college because only after students know such languages, the more advance topics of data-structures, algorithms, etc could be taught.

There's no way to teach most advance topics in computer-science unless the student knows languages to implement, practice and build those topics.

[OrangeBlossomBaby]

Originally Posted by raananh

I was a professor reaching computer science at college. Personally I did not teach programming-languages, but other professors did.

Programming languages like Assembler, Fortran, Pascal, Cobol, C, etc were taught in college because only after students know such languages, the more advance topics of data-structures, algorithms, etc could be taught.

There's no way to teach most advance topics in computer-science unless the student knows languages to implement, practice and build those topics.

Except for Assembly, all those were taught in my high school, in the late 1970's. I took C++ and Visual Basic, and advanced C++ and advanced VB, at the community college in the early 1990's just because I wanted to learn them. They were definitely taught, and both C++ and VB are real actual legitimate programming languages.

[biker1]

No. Reel-to-real tapes were used for program and data storage, not memory, which is used for program execution, file caching, OS, etc.. Disk storage was also widely available in that time frame on everything from a Cray-1 to a DEC PDP-11 to an IBM S/360 etc. BASIC is a toy language. You would have been better off taking Pascal where you would have at least had a chance to learn such basic concepts such as data structures and recursion.

Originally Posted by OrangeBlossomBaby

I was programming on a dummy terminal connected to a teletype machine with tickertape, and three huge "refrigerator-case" computers in another room that had reel-to-reel tapes for memory. That was in 1978, in high school. I was disqualified from taking algebra II because I got a D in algebra I. My choices for senior math class were re-taking algebra I and then summer school for algebra II, or computer programming. My options were BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN, or PASCAL. I took BASIC.

There was no Windows, no DOS, no PCs. Just clickety-click with black screen, amber text, we mapped out our programs on paper with plastic templates before entering them into the computer, the insane but always entertaining divide by zero error, and the equally entertaining "goto" function.

[biker1]

It didn't work that way when I was an undergrad. The first month of the first class was devoted to teaching the syntax of PL/C and then it was on to non language specific topics.

Originally Posted by raananh

I was a professor reaching computer science at college. Personally I did not teach programming-languages, but other professors did.

Programming languages like Assembler, Fortran, Pascal, Cobol, C, etc were taught in college because only after students know such languages, the more advance topics of data-structures, algorithms, etc could be taught.

There's no way to teach most advance topics in computer-science unless the student knows languages to implement, practice and build those topics.

[jimhoward]

Originally Posted by biker1

Fortran is hardly stale. It is still the language of choice for many science and engineering disciplines. Programming languages are tools. You choose the correct tool for the job. The fact that you don't hear much about it doesn't mean that it isn't doing most of the heavy lifting behind the scenes in many technical fields on HPC systems. The latest Fortran standard supports data structures, recursion, dynamic memory allocation, user specified precision, interoperability with other languages and architectures such as GPUs via CUDA, implicit parallelization, explicit parallelization via MPI, compiles down to efficient code, has many libraries of scientific routines, etc. These are important characteristics for computationally intensive simulations in many technical fields. If it isn't computationally intensive then it probably isn't being used as other languages would probably be a better choice. There is also a lot of work done in C. Most users of simulation tools are not the programmers of the tools but there is a good chance that the computational kernel of simulation tool is written in Fortran.

As I already stated, the fundamentals taught at the undergraduate level makes advanced studies in graduate school possible.

While written tongue in cheek in 1983, it is still true:

Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL

Thanks for that. I didn't know Fortran was still used. I am not in the computer field. I do however, do quite bit of numerically intensive simulation and modeling. Mainly using damped-least squares optimization, and some fast Fourier Transforms and image processing. But just as a user. I was told the source code for the various modules in legacy programs I am using was done in C++. Interesting to learn that it is probably still Fortran.

I have known quite a few people who subscribed to your real men don't program in Pascal bit. I think I have read it before. I would think it very hard to develop and maintain code across a team, if people really worked like that.

But this is getting very field a field from the original topic.

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