31 Aug
2017
31 Aug
'17
10:51 p.m.
On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 4:37 PM, William Cheswick <ches(a)cheswick.com> wrote:
I wrote a plotter driver for the CDC in Pascal.
Brian’s comments were
apt: drivers aren’t quite the same as a filter, even a Knuthian-style
program.
I thought the world would end up using some post-Pascal, strongly typed
language. Maybe Oberon or Modula would fix things. (I don’t think any of
a decade’s worth of Pascal programs I wrote ever had a buffer overflow
vulnerability.)
ditto, Pascal and Mod-II and Mod-III were pretty slick. They were a
little wordy compared to C, but I admit the programs we wrote in them "just
worked" and I can not think any security issues in any that we wrote.
I look to the likes of go and rust to get us back on track. C is a pretty
good assembly language.
+1
But Ches, that leaves the open question of what to teach? My daughter
loves it and that's what college taught her, but I cringe when I look at
what she and her peeps do with Python. To me that's more like shell
scripting. Maybe its my inner curmudgeon showing.
I have not seen anything like Clancy's "Oh Pascal" book in the key of Go,
much less Brinch Hansen's "Java for Everyone" which I still think are two
of the best teaching text out there.