On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 4:37 PM, William Cheswick <ches@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.

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.