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by pcblues 55 days ago
I always enjoy these summaries. I took my bachelor of computer science in the early 1990s. It covered a language in most of these categories.

We didn't learn APL (Who is teaching the use of those custom keyboards to 100s of young students for one semester?)

The processing power of systems at the time made it clear which language classes were practically useful and usable for the time and which were not.

Prolog ran like a dog for even simple sets of logic.

We had the best internet access and pretty powerful desktop systems for the time.

I'm still curious why we didn't learn smalltalk. Could have been the difficulty of submitting and marking a system in a particular state rather than a file of code :)

3 comments

> who

Yale :-) Alan Perlis' intro to CS at Yale back in the late 80s was an APL class (a relatively small one, though.)

A Smalltalk implementation provides:

    Smalltalk VM 

    Smalltalk image file 

    sources file (plain-text original source code file) 

    changes file (plain-text change log, initially empty)
So there are plenty of ways to submit code to be marked.

See "OU LearningWorks: a customized programming environment for Smalltalk modules"

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/841064

Virginia Tech at least used to - the school of Architecture had a programming in APL class.
That's amazing. I used to live under an architecture student (our building). His command of design history was great. His command of maths? Well, not so much.