Hacker News Reader

Comment by tonteldoos | Hacker News Reader

Turbo Pascal was the standard when I was in high school (matriculated in 98). No idea what has been used in the interrim, although the article makes it look like Java, among other things. If this hadn't been the case, I could understand Delphi, but it makes very little sense now.

View on HN

Pascal is a pretty good teaching language, Java is hopelessly complex. Delphi is too bloated for intro stuff. Simple, featureless, procedural languages that are not C are pretty good for beginners.

I'd be tempted to agree, but in that case you can even look at things like VB (in whichever flavour). You would need to somehow keep the subjects relevant to the current environment too, otherwise the clued up kids will get bored, and the less clued up ones will be more clued up, but in mostly irrelevant tech (school IT doesn't teach abstract computer science - it teaches stuff you can use to a degree).

It is worth noting that Pascal was originally intended as an extremely portable language to teach structured programming. It was only later that people began actually using it for real stuff.

The key to its portability was that it shipped with an interpreter that would run under a simple bytecode machine. Implement that bytecode and you could run Pascal on virtually anything. Back in 1970, this was a pretty useful feature.

It depends what province you are from. I matriculated in 2008 and went to school in the Eastern Cape where we still did Delphi. However, I think other places such as Gauteng and the Western Cape were doing Java. I remember the final exam being split into Delphi and java sections so these are probably the only languages being taught.

Amazing... Turbo Pascal was the standard when I was in high school in 1986 as well....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_pascal

Apparently it's been around REALLY long! And it was the official language for SA secondary schools till 2002.

finished school in 94 with pascal as well, got to varsity and suddenly oberon. Pascal was an easy and great language to learn on (20 years ago). Delphi might not be that bad, the language seems nicely designed (from looking at it more than a decade ago) and java is not something I think high schoolers should be taught. C and Scheme should feature earlier IMO.

MIT used Scheme as a first programming language till around 2009. It doesn't really matter if a language is "old", as long as it helps students understand what needs to be taught.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com