Although I agree with much of your post, I respectfully disagree with the premise that programming is very language specific. I've only used a few languages (the old DOS QuickBasic, Visual Basic, Visual C#, and Intel assembly... I *hate* C and C++) but it's clear the focus of modern high level languages is structure. Even the pre-.NET VB has strong structure while being a snap to learn.
If you think about it, everything we plan is a program. Understanding how to structure and modularize plans (including "exception handling" - dealing with potential snags) is the key to carrying off any big project. Outlining provides the same sort of benefit for small projects but doesn't have the potential for minimizing interactions or handling vagaries of fate that structured logic does.
I was in a class of about 20 at work, learning about setting up a monitoring system for our trunking radios. The CPU card had to be programmed in ladder logic, and the instructor asked how many of us had programming experience. I was surprised to see every one of us did.
Awww, don't be hating C/C++, Mike - they are like comfy slippers to me :)
After thinking about it some more, you're right: C# is best especially for kids because it takes little effort to see major results. Java is good that way too, but clearly C# is the way to go nowadays, with the now prevalent .NET architecture.
I've been teaching my 15 year old son C++, but - after thinking about it now - maybe we should switch... Thanks for the thought.
Yup, I think so too. There's no better teacher than getting utterly frustrated at a problem, requiring some hair pulling. Besides teaching good logic thinking skills, it also teaches tenacity.
Oh, yeah! My favorite was a decibel conversion we were trying to incorporate into a simple baseband monitor. We had a nice SBC that had everything we needed in a compact and cheap package... but it booted to a version of BASIC that was limited to 8 bits and had no floating point math. Not ideal for the task: convert a digitized input to the nearest dB over a 10 dB (a bit more than a 3:1) range. The formula is . Huh. A couple days later it hit me and the algorithm fit into fewer than a dozen lines of code. The trick was to choose a seed, initialize a loop counter to 10 (decrementing to
0), and subtract the integer divide by ten from the seed (effectively multiplying the seed by 0.9) with each pass. When the input value exceeded the result, the counter was the dB value. One mid-loop correction brought it within spec. I love it! It should be taught in college! ;-)
I suppose it could have been done with a lookup table, but what's the fun in that?
So you don't believe in Creationism either? After all it makes even less sense and has less evidence to support it than any major theory of evolution does.
On the contrary, creation is the only explanation for our existence that makes any sense at all. My personal belief is that the creation comes from what we regard as ourselves, reminiscent of Taoism. Few people agree with me and I see no purpose in trying to explain, much less to convince anybody. Even the simple explanation is lengthy, but my belief doesn't alter the fact of the utter inadequacy of evolutionary theory in the origin of Mankind.
You assume we are fundamentally biological beings, but the evidence is heavily against that. If we are fundamentally biological, we are probably the products of evolution. But evolution falls far short of explaining why we should have the capacity for abstract thought. There is no theoretical mechanism for it, as natural selection is the mechanism for physical improvements. Natural selection has only the most marginal effect on intelligence; the intelligence of parents is not clearly related to the intelligence of offspring. Larger brains allow for greater capacity for skills, but abstract thought is a very different matter. Nor can we theorize that social units containing intellectually superior individuals will thrive - that is contrary to the process of natural selection, which requires the suppression of weaker individuals. In addition, related lines should show similar development - the Great Apes should compete quite closely with us for intellectual capability.
Hominids have been around roughly five million years. At an average of 10 generations per century, this allows something like half a million generations for the physical changes from Australopithecus to Homo Sapiens to occur. So far so good. But the first hint of abstract thought - cave drawings - only dates back about 30,000 years. Allowing for undiscovered cave drawings and other uncertainties, let's place it at 100,000 years... possibly as many as 10,000 generations ago. Agriculture appeared 10,000 years (1000 generations) ago. Writing is about as old. I don't know what happened in the last 10,000 generations, but it clearly was not evolutionary forces that produced our level of thought. There is no evidence whatever, and a predominance of indications to the contrary, that 10,000 generations ago hominids existed that could have engaged in this conversation (language barriers aside).
There is no evolutionary basis for art, literature, science, mathematics, philosophy, law or religion. For the reasons I cited above, schools of evolved beings could teach skills, but not ideas - they could not conceive of biology. There would be no books, because books contain only symbols and pictorial representations: abstractions. Evolved beings are fundamentally interchangable, so individual deaths would be meaningless. That sort of existence, what I refer to as an "earth and sky" perspective, is alien to human existence anywhere on Earth. We are, as the saying goes, spirits in the material world.
That's clearly your perception - do you have any evidence that is actually the case? I very much doubt it. We have already seen in other posts in this thread that there is a popular stereotype of adherents to creation theory as stupid, and adherents to evolution theory as smart. I think I have dented the first stereotype and I suggest the second isn't at all accurate; evolutionists are often just uncritical of what they have been taught. I don't blame people for that - is there anybody who isn't busy? It's a question of priorities, whether to do the research and thought required to examine controversial beliefs. I would respect an evolutionist who did the research, if I ever meet one.
We live in a time (maybe all times are the same in this respect) where dogma is presented as "scientific fact." Do you believe CFCs are responsible for seasonal ozone holes over the Arctic and Antarctic? Or that the Arctic is thawing because of global warming? Or that fossil fuels are responsible for the rise in atmospheric CO2 in recent decades?
Where are the flaws? I've discussed this at length with an on-line friend who is very bright and who disagrees with me about nearly everything - a combination we both value. We have an irreconcilable disagreement about the science behind macro evolution, mostly because his standards for science are slightly looser than mine. He has been chewing on the failure of evolution to explain the sudden development of the capacity for abstract thought for more than a month now and has come up with nothing... a new record for our discussions. Maybe I should stop tweaking him about it :-)
I have no illusions about changing your beliefs; there would be no benefit to me in that anyway. I just hope you and others reading this will drop the demeaning stereotypes.
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