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.
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