Progamming in UK Schools

[Sigord]

What amuses me is some of the stupid subjects some are allowed to study at University etc. of no use to employers what so ever. Also having a degree in anything will not necessarily help you get a job, as sometimes it can scare the wits out of an incompetent employer terrified your ideas might show him up.

So if you are desperate for ANY job, such as sweeping the road or stacking shelves keep quiet about your degree/s. My boss told us before some of us chose early retirement, how he was fed up with clever guys with degrees applying for our job when all he wanted was them mostly to sort Share Transfers in order!!

[vdecampo]

One thing I wish they would teach at University is how to start your own business and be an entrepreneur. They always seem to stress preparing to work for someone else.

-Vince

[dodicat]

Surely business studies at University is just that (vdecampo), or at least close.

UK schools prepare kids for either a trade/skill or University.
I'm not sure which category programming would fall into, probably both.

Unfortunately Trades have died in this country, a slow rot over these last years, and yet the British make good Tradesmen/women and artisans.
Look at the stuff we have produced over the years.

It is a vicious circle really, the less jobs there are in the real world, the more youngsters move on to silly University courses just to fill in time.

Programming in schools could fill a bit of a void perhaps.

How many British people are in this forum?

That will give an indication of Computer programming in the UK.

[marcov]

Here(NL) there is programming below university, but its level is generally sad. Really sad. Cranks out bottom level sysadmins at best. (better ones are bachelor)

For anything approximating real programming you need to do at least university bachelor.

[BasicCoder2]

For anything approximating real programming you need to do at least university bachelor.

Doing some science and some programming at least gives you an idea of what is possible and how it all works.
Most people are scientifically illiterate and proud of it and as a result believe all sorts of silly pseudoscience and have no idea what constitutes evidence that is likely to be true (work).
So I guess I don't anything approaching real programming because I don't have a bachelor degree in computer science?
Do real programmers use BASIC?

[marcov]

For anything approximating real programming you need to do at least university bachelor.

Doing some science and some programming at least gives you an idea of what is possible and how it all works.
Most people are scientifically illiterate and proud of it and as a result believe all sorts of silly pseudoscience and have no idea what constitutes evidence that is likely to be true (work).
So I guess I don't anything approaching real programming because I don't have a bachelor degree in computer science?
Do real programmers use BASIC?

Like in any trade or even science, there are always the 1-5% that make their own way, regardless on how they are encouraged because they provide their own drive.

I was talking about maximizing the potential and the resulting level of the 50% that mostly just do the work and get a certificate. The difference is somewhat in between (not die hard doing own projects, but more than just the works)

And there from what I've seen in the NL, the average level below bachelor is sad in CS, more so than in other directions. E.g. before CS, I originally studied chemical engineering, and my impression of trade school level educated laboratory personnel or process engineers was much more favourable.

Probably a combination of a (still) moving field and the result that to get to a decent level in CS, you need to do more than just pass the classes passively.

From what I've seen in the CS educations below the bachelor level, the number that vegetates in class is much higher than the above percentage, the average level of the classes is much lower and less abstract, and the knowledge conveyed often less durable than on bachelor+ level, and usually half outdated when they graduate. The combined effect causes the great gap I guess.

[BasicCoder2]

My responses came down, I think, to what you meant by a real programmer. I am an amateur hobby programmer and would have been wasting my time trying to do computer science to become someone capable of professional programming. For some reason I enjoy it just as someone might enjoy tennis or art without ever having the talent or ability to become professional. It is the reason I gravitated to BASIC because I found it easy to learn and use and of course FreeBASIC was a nice replacement for the QBASIC I was most familiar with. Although there are many incarnations of "BASIC" their weakness is they all go about things differently. I hate the Tower of Babel approach to developing "new" languages. I simply don't have the time to have to learn umpteen ways to do something. An ideal language has a basic core set of statements and then libraries to choose from to implement a project. In that sense I liked C or C++.

[marcov]

In that sense I liked C or C++.

Both are IMHO overly complicated. If only because their specification is so terse.

C++ is so complicated, whole libraries have been written about only the STL aspect. IMHO C++ should have let go of the C legacy at some point.

[BasicCoder2]

@marcov,

Well of course I never made use of all of the C++ programming features like templates. Essentially I used a subset of C and although that included using C++ objects my code wasn't OOP and it essentially could be translated easily to BASIC and back. As a result I am oblivious to any short comings in C because I don't know enough about it.

[Sigord]

Never having been employed in IT, though I have dabbled in a little Pascal, C, even Forth I concentrate on various Basic as you can see from my site. I have always maintained it does not matter what language you use so long as it does the job. How many who visit my site or the distributors kindly hosting my free software, to download my efforts can tell what language I use?

It seems to me like tasting wine there is a certain amount of snobbery about programming and what language is used. The most important point is insuring a program does the job properly. Something the young nerds of MS failed to recognise in their failure to include the extremely important START button in the original Window 8. They were all obsessed in trying to drag us all into the Tablet age!

[dodicat]

I think that Freebasic, as far as oop is concerned, is following C++.
When full classes are introduced, I would guess that C++ is the template.
Anyway, the libraries for FB are written in C, so it is logical that extensions to Freebasic are C++ based.

As far as I can see, C and C++ dominate computer programming by underlying many languages.
It would be an advantage to teach C++ in schools, surely?

Linux and Windows are written almost exclusively in C/C++, so there is no escaping the reality of 2015 computing science.

Happy new year all!

[schoolman]

This is why I started this thread to try instil into youngsters NEVER to accept everything new MUST be better, but to learn to judge everything on its merits. That is perhaps try to learn a computer language to write software the way you want it as I have done for years. Though I still think it advisable to gain confidence with a fairly simple BASIC like QB / FB largely in plain English, before you dive into the gobbledygook of such as 'C' or JavaScript !!

I agree. You might enjoy Why Johnny can't code, which apparently inspired the author of BASIC-256.

I've just started working on a tutorial site for wannabe programmers and have decided to use FB as the target language. The nice thing about FB is its dialects, which allow progressively more sophisticated concepts and layers of abstraction. So in the initial tutorial sections I'll be using -lang qb, and then introducing more "advanced" topics like OOP in a series of blog posts, so the sequence will be qb --> fblite ---> fb.

[TESLACOIL]

The Perfect Education ? Have given this considerable thought, the answer is rather simple

Start teaching stone age skills at infant school and as the child ages , start teaching them more and more advanced technologies.

Thus in their last year or so of school they are taught futurism and bleeding edge research and development.



Ultimately you are trying to instill wisdom, the above path ive described would be natural. Too some small extent we already teach children this way, but we are not 'deliberate' enough.

Sadly, teacher like generals tend to fight the last war. Many teachers just want an easy stress free life, thus they actively choose careers 'as gods of little people' However they are far generally from gods. Teachers are conservative, cautious and lazy.

REMEMBER THE PRIMARY function of schools in western societies is childcare , a place to dump children whie parents go out to work.

EDUCATION IS SECONDARY

*Note a highly complex 'work orientated society' is a dangerous and unsuitable place for naive unsophisticated 'little people' to wander about in.


ref Progamming in UK Schools

Having built an abacus at age 5, a weaving loom with punch cards age 8, a Babbage engine and radio by age 10 THEN the pupil is well placed to start circuit board design and code appreciation lessons....you get me now ?



Ideally schools should be food for work sweatshops with an emphasis on high ethics and low sweat

That way the next generation is not only prepared for work but also very well prepared for the wider global and indeed galactic reality....Last time i looked we still dont have an asteroid defence mechanism in place, we are trashing the planet, ie 'short term strength though exhaustion' , we are burning our uranium bridge to space colonization, global population and or consumption controls are still not in place. Our oil powered world has only 15 or so years left before dire oil shortages cause unrest on a global scale. Gas supply will barley last this living generation, all coal will be gone in a century....inconvenient truths ? perhaps !....but they would not be inconvenient to any one who had a REAL education...i had to teach myself, im lucky i was born with innate curiosity as to how things work....i have already forgotten more than most human beings will ever know.

[TJF]

A life without VB6 is possible but useless.

@schoolman

the above statement becomes true when you replace useless by painless.

Why do you waste the time of your students / readers by teaching stuff they neither will nor should use?

[BasicCoder2]

I've just started working on a tutorial site for wannabe programmers and have decided to use FB as the target language. The nice thing about FB is its dialects, which allow progressively more sophisticated concepts and layers of abstraction. So in the initial tutorial sections I'll be using -lang qb, and then introducing more "advanced" topics like OOP in a series of blog posts, so the sequence will be qb --> fblite ---> fb.

Personally I would skip the qb,fblite and just start with a reduced set of instructions using the current FB compiler.

Although initially, FreeBASIC emulated QBASIC syntax as closely as possible, the language has since evolved in the direction of interest to its developers, which seems to be C++, rather than perhaps the interests of those who chose FreeBasic as a QuickBASIC replacement instead of Visual Basic.

The original BASIC dialect is simple, easy to learn and similar to spoken English although I see no reason it could not have used keywords of another language.

BASIC can give the casual user the power to do things that were only available to advanced programmers by having those things encapsulated in simple commands.

Instead of evolving FreeBasic by adding commands it has been transmuting into another language which looks nothing like the original readable beginners language. Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

The direction FB has taken isn't wrong it is just not BASIC.