Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

Programming

Teaching to university students again (on a part-time basis)

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At 16:30 today, I’ll start teaching Enterprise Application Development to MSc Advanced Computing students of the CDAC School of Advanced Computing, a joint venture between the University of Mauritius and the Center for Development of Advanced Computing in India.

Of course, I’ll only do that on a part-time basis, once per week (Wednesday from 16:30 – 19:30) for the next 15 weeks. I’m still the Managing-Director of Knowledge Seven Ltd :-)

I was a little bit unwilling to take up that module initially, so soon after leaving the University of Mauritius and still in the process of launching my own company. In the end, I accepted because (i) I was going to be paid for that (ha!), (ii) I had developed the outline for the Enterprise Application Development module when I was at the University with the view to teach it one day and (iii) I love teaching.

Argh! One hour left! Are my slides ready? And my rotin bazaar?

Turbo Pascal 1.0 is 25 years old

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Twenty-five years ago (on 20 November 1983 to be precise), something I consider very important happened: Borland released Turbo Pascal 1.0.

Turbo Pascal 1.0 was a small software application (only 68 kilobytes) that ran on MS-DOS and CP/M and which featured an IDE to develop console applications using the Pascal programming language.

 

I believe Turbo Pascal 1.0 was an important milestone because it allowed countless people of my age to learn structured programming using a programming language created by someone who was an expert in creating programming languages but also teaching and pedagogy, Niklaus Wirth. I believe that many students (and I am not alone) have difficulties learning programming today because of our focus on C-like languages like C++ and Java which are excellent tools for professionals but oh so lousy for teaching the Art of Programming.

I wrote a blog entry in 2007 to explain how I became a programmer. I wrote about my affection for Turbo-Pascal and GW-BASIC. [Incidentally, I believe a modern equivalent would be DrScheme which I like a lot and which I used last year to teach (sound) programming techniques to second year university students.]

Here is a small Hello World programme written in Pascal:

Program HelloWorld(output);
Begin
    Writeln('Hello, World!')
End.

A big thank you to all those who made Turbo-Pascal 1.0 possible.