stephenbooth's Journal: Learning to Program

Just found this in a post to the Alumni chat mailing list for my university:

I notice that some of the earlier alumni messages discuss the vocational aspect of a university education and the difference between an engineer and a scientist. The distinction was certainly blurred by Harry Greenwood's method of introducing students to programming. More or less by chance I accompanied a friend into her "terminal" course on computing. Harry sat each of us in front of a teletype (you won't see one these days except in an old film, or maybe a long-mothballed nuclear bunker), showed us how to print out and re-edit the Basic code for a noughts-and crosses game, and then told us to tinker with the code to see the effect. Specification? Fagan inspection? OO, patterns, safe subsets, metrics? Formal language theory, compiler operation, verification? Nah! Just hack it and see what happens! That ended my ambition to study chemistry, and it's been downhill ever since.

Gave me a bit of a laugh.