
An introductory course in computer programming (1965) - federicoponzi
http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2709&context=compsci
======
gumby
I liked this part: "the student is treated in no way differently from the
faculty or staff in the nature of...contact with the processing capacity of
the computer." Says a lot about the hierarchy of the period (as does the use
of "his contact" in the original...)

This is ironic to me because I have seen that the other way from usual: in
1984 I was a TA at Stanford for a class whose students were grad students and
faculty in the philosophy department (I was part of a team at PARC developing
a new programming language relevant to the work at the newly formed CSLI).
Most of them had never touched a computer before. Some of the faculty didn't
enjoy being "students" again, and many didn't do the homework.

And a couple of years before I was taking a humanities class at MIT. A special
section of 6.001 (introduction to programming, taught in Scheme) was being
offered to the faculty. He asked me for help with the homework.

This was at a time when I think the majority of MIT undergraduates arrived
without having used a computer more powerful than a pocket calculator.

------
default-kramer
I find this funny:

 _Flow charts are not a programming language, largely because they are two
dimensional and pictorial, and there is no convenient way of reading them into
the computer. This situation will almost certainly change, since graphical
input devices using large cathode ray tubes are now being developed for
computers; but for the present, flow charts are limited to expressing
algorithms._

~~~
suyash
Developers need to start taking Flowcharts, UML more seriously - I think most
people don't see it's full power.

~~~
nerdponx
I commented on this recently:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13822441](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13822441)

It seems the only "visual programming" environments are either domain-
specific, esoteric, intended for children, or some combination of the above.
And I think that's a damn shame. I'm a data scientist, not a computer
scientist: give me a suitable abstraction layer on top of code, and I will use
it. I think flowchart-based programming is one way, maybe the only way, to
make this possible.

~~~
michaelchisari
Until someone can come up with a way to draw faster than we can type,
programming will always tend towards text.

~~~
nerdponx
I'd love to get an MVP for this kind of product up and running and actually do
user speed testing. My money would be on comparable speed in first-time users,
and higher productivity in practiced users.

Of course, a GUI's performance would highly depend on its user experience. I
wonder how an existing graph manipulation program like Gephi might fare,
versus something specifically optimized for this task.

------
suyash
This is fantastic. So much has not changed in the programming curriculum at
universities in 50 years - just the language and few more complementary
classes.

------
beezle
One had to wait a few more years to have rudimentary i/o standardized in
Algol.

------
palavsen
It's so strange to see that not much have been changed in the computer
programming course in college since 1965

