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September 25, 2006
Thanks Mickey
I originally wrote this at the very end of last year, but apparently never published it. So, old topic. But I liked the post anyway, so here it is...
No, this isn't about Disney. It's about Michael Sprague, my high school computer science teacher. I no longer see him on the school's website. He'd only be about 50 now. A little young to retire. But maybe not. I hope he found something better to do than teach teenagers about computers, but he was pretty great at that. So actually I hope he's still doing it.
What brought "Mr. Sprague" to mind was Joel's latest [ed. not so latest anymore] essay, The Perils of JavaSchools, and Dori's followup, You think you're old? recounting her computer science education back in the day, as the kids say.
Dori nicely summarizes Joel's argument: "[In] the old days, programmers went to college, learned C, and got a good understanding of what was going on deep down internally. Nowadays, these newfangled programmers are only learning Java, and consequently, they don't know anything about recursion or pointers. Schools should teach Scheme and C, and the students will be the better for it."
And that got me thinking. Pointers and recursion. Yeah, he's right. Sprague had us doing those in PDP-11/70 assembler and Pascal (for the AP test the following year) and some pseudo-language of his own invention when I was a junior in high school.
I mean, like, for months it was dereference this, parse-this-expression-into-a-tree that. And after a while our heads did explode. But we felt better for it. And, you know what?, the following year the small group of us that could put our heads back together again won the ACSL state championship really without even worrying about it. (Ok, so we placed, I think, 9th nationally but that had more to do with our hastily arranged trip to Amish country than anything else.)
This was a good thing, too. When I went to college, a really, really long time ago, at least in Internet time, my alma mater didn't even offer a formal computer science undergraduate education. (It was considered "too practical". Apparently that's now changed.) So I went to law school...
Now I don't bring this up to say "see, I was doing this in high school, look at me", I bring this up to say a sincere thank you to whomever at LHS decided they could start a computer science curriculum around an 8 year old 16-bit minicomputer and to give a tremendously big shout out to Mickey. You guys saved my butt.
Posted by ttalbot at 10:17 PM