computer science teacher create own program

[Leandro Coutinho]

Do you think that every computer science teacher should be able to create his own programming language?

I think that Alan Kay said this, but I don't remember the source ...


Well, I think I agree with him. =)

[Joe Ess]

Leandro Coutinho wrote:Well, I think I agree with him. =)

Why do you agree with him? Have you created your own programming language? If so, what did it add to your understanding of computer science? If not, what do you feel you lack that creating your own language would fulfill?

[fred rosenberger]

No more than a Spanish teacher should have to come up with a new human language, or a Math teacher should have to come up with a new branch of mathematics. Should an English teacher have to write a book? Should a science teacher have to discover something new?

[Himanshu Gupta]

Leandro Coutinho wrote:Do you think that every computer science teacher should be able to create his own programming language?

and then do what???

[Ryan McGuire]

fred rosenberger wrote:No more than a Spanish teacher should have to come up with a new human language, or a Math teacher should have to come up with a new branch of mathematics. Should an English teacher have to write a book? Should a science teacher have to discover something new?

Not "should create a new programming language"... "should be able to" do so.

Yes, a science teacher should be able to discover something new, and an English teacher should be able to write a book.

I still haven't quite decided if a Spanish teacher should be able to create a new human language or if a Math teacher should be able to come up with a new branch of mathematics. Maybe.

I'm not convinced that all of those are all on the same order of difficulty.

[Campbell Ritchie]

Creating a new "natural" language is much more difficult than creating a new context-free language. Any good computer scientist ought to know how to create a context-free grammar and should know the rudiments of writing a compiler for that grammar.

[Pat Farrell]

fred rosenberger wrote:Math teacher should have to come up with a new branch of mathematics.

Well, this depends a lot on what job the "teacher" really has. At a research university, the faculty have to teach classes, but they are hired and promoted for research, not teaching. So in this case, inventing a new branch of mathematics would earn you a full professorship, and freedom from ever teaching a class again.

To the original topic: inventing a new computer language is really not all that special. Its done all the time. But its also so easy that you get no credit for it.

Inventing a language that becomes widely used, is different. That is a big deal. Depending on your definition of "widely used" there may have been only a dozen or two languages since the Eniac.

Assembler, macro, fortran, algol, cobol, c, c++, smalltalk, pascal, bliss, PL/1. lisp, perl, basic, java, php, there must be more, but it starts to get harder to decide if its signficant and I'm only up to 16. Add Python and your favorites, and we are still not up to two dozen.