Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!voa3!ck From: ck@voa3.UUCP (Chris Kern) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: Being a consultant Summary: BASIC Isn't Working Message-ID: <211@voa3.UUCP> Date: 19 Aug 89 15:39:52 GMT References: <5595@ficc.uu.net> <6221@hubcap.clemson.edu> <166@bbxeng.UUCP> <5778@ficc.uu.net> Reply-To: ck@voa3.UUCP (Chris Kern) Organization: Voice of America, Washington, D.C. Lines: 25 In article <5778@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes: >My favorite [lab assistant story] was the business administration >student who came up to me and said "Basic isn't working". [He was typing BASIC statements into his command interpreter (shell).] Thus has it been since the Dawn of BASIC. This type of "problem" was not uncommon when I first started programming in BASIC at Dartmouth in 1965 (although, naturally, I don't remember ever being guilty of such a solecism myself). A self-contained programming environment tends to encourage this kind of confusion. Perhaps one answer to the perennial question about "which language to teach first" is that, whatever it is, the translator ought not to insulate the user too much from the rest of the system. There is something to be said for edit-compile-bind-run: it makes the the point early that a language translator is just another application program. I don't suppose this is a problem for the average CS major, no matter how inexperienced. But there are plenty of computer users -- including many who like to write their own programs -- who have a very dim understanding of the environment provided by their systems. -- Chris Kern Voice of America, Washington, D.C. ...uunet!voa3!ck +1 202-485-7020