RE: teaching a totally blind person to program
- From: "Ken Perry" <whistler@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:17:36 -0700
Religious debates about programming? Never.
1:1 In the beginning Man created the ENIAC in a bid to put all women into a
field that would drive them mad but the 6 women who coded it thrived and
coded in Machine language and it was good.
Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC
1:2 And the ENIAC was without the power to do real calculations with out a
lot of power, a fork lift, 6 programmers and a blown tube once a day and the
spirit of Edmund Berkeley moved across the circuits.
1.3 In 1950 Edmund said let there be PC's and Simon was created and there
were PC's.
Ref: http://www.blinkenlights.com/pc.shtml
1.4 Man saw the computer and thought this is good but the languages suck
and this is bad so from that point on they moved to improve:
1.4.1951 Grace Hopper , working for Remington Rand, begins design work on
the first widely known compiler, named A-0. When the language is released by
Rand in 1.4.1957, it is called MATH-MATIC.
1.4.1952 Alick E. Glennie , in his spare time at the University of
Manchester, devises a programming system called AUTOCODE, a rudimentary
compiler.
1.4.1957 FORTRAN --mathematical FORmula TRANslating system--appears.
Heading the team is John Backus, who goes on to contribute to the
development of ALGOL and the well-known syntax-specification system known as
BNF.
1.4.1958 FORTRAN II appears, able to handle subroutines and links to
assembly language. John McCarthy at M.I.T. begins work on LISP--LISt
Processing.
The original specification for ALGOL appears. The specific ation does not
describe how data will be input or output; that is left to the individual
implementations.
1.4.1959 LISP 1.5 appears. COBOL is created by the Conference on Data
Systems and Languages (CODASYL).
1.4.1960 ALGOL 60 , the first block-structured language, appears. This is
the root of the family tree that will ultimately produce the likes of
Pascal. ALGOL goes on to become the most popular language in Europe in the
mid- to late-1960s.
Sometime in the early 1960s , Kenneth Iverson begins work on the language
that will become APL--A Programming Language. It uses a specialized
character set that, for proper use, requires APL-compatible I/O devices.
1.4.1965 SNOBOL3 appears.
1.4.1975
Tiny BASIC by Bob Albrecht and Dennis Allison (implementation by Dick
Whipple and John Arnold) runs on a microcomputer in 2 KB of RAM. A 4-KB
machine is sizable, which left 2 KB available for the program.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen write a version of BASIC that they sell to MITS
(Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) on a per-copy royalty basis.
MITS is producing the Altair, an 8080-based microcomputer.
Scheme , a LISP dialect by G.L. Steele and G.J. Sussman, appears.
Pascal User Manual and Report , by Jensen and Wirth, is published. Still
considered by many to be the definitive reference on Pascal.
B.W. Kerninghan describes RATFOR--RATional FORTRAN. It is a preprocessor
that allows C-like control structures in FORTRAN. RATFOR is used in
Kernighan and Plauger's "Software Tools," which appears in 1976.
1.4.1980
Smalltalk-80 appears.
Modula-2 appears.
Franz LISP appears.
Bjarne Stroustrup develops a set of languages -- collectively referred to as
"C With Classes" -- that serve as the breeding ground for C++.
1.4.1985
Forth controls the submersible sled that locates the wreck of the Titanic.
Vanilla SNOBOL4 for microcomputers is released.
Methods , a line-oriented Smalltalk for PCs, is introduced.
1.4.1990
C++ 2.1 , detailed in Annotated C++ Reference Manual by B. Stroustrup et al,
is published. This adds templates and exception-handling features.
FORTRAN 90 includes such new elements as case statements and derived types.
Kenneth Iverson and Roger Hui present J at the APL90 conference.
1.4.1995
In February , ISO accepts the 1995 revision of the Ada language. Called Ada
95, it includes OOP features and support for real-time systems.
Full ref: http://www.byte.com/art/9509/sec7/art19.htm
1.5 The programmers looked and said this is good we can now get a job and
make millions just converting from one type of code to another.
Now if you actually got to this point in the email if you didn't read those
three web pages through out that mess its worth a look. As for the
question. In truth I think the first thing a blind coder should learn is
the binary system and how to convert from it to other formats. That's not a
coding language I know but it's the basis this all runs on. From there if
your asking my personal opinion and I think you were the day the coders
started going down hill was the day all Colleges went from C to, java or
Pascal as a starting language. Don't get me wrong Pascal and java are both
good languages and Java better than Pascal by far but if you want to teach
someone to code in a clear manor then C is your beast. After a person can
deal with a compiler and C and all the rules that go along with it going to
any other language weather it be scripting or compiled there is nothing you
can't do.
Ken
__________
View the list's information and change your settings at
//www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind
Other related posts:
