The consequences of one's first programming language

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The consequences of one's first programming language

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Symposium on Small Systems archive
Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSMALL symposium and the first SIGPC symposium on Small systems table of contents

Palo Alto, California, United States

Pages: 52 - 55

Year of Publication: 1980

ISBN:0-89791-024-9

Author

Richard L. Wexelblat

Sponsors

SIGPC : SIGPC
SIGSMALL : ACM Special Interest Group on Small and Personal Computing Systems and Applications

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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Downloads (6 Weeks): 3, Downloads (12 Months): 28, Citation Count: 1

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ABSTRACT

Who has not seen programs written in one programming language that have the style of another language? Having experienced “Fortran with semicolons” and “C with a BASIC flavor” over the years, it occurred to me to wonder whether the programmer's first programming language had an effect on programming ability as profound as the effect of one's native language on one's thought patterns. Over many years of programming, teaching programming, and debugging other people's programs, it seemed to me that something akin to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis applied to programmers—especially those who have never been taught to abstract the development of algorithms from the development of programs. Indeed, I began to worry about the consequences of loosing on the computer centers (and computer science departments) of a horde of programmers whose total background is a rudimentary BASIC learned in elementary or high school from a teacher who has virtually no actual programming experience.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

	1	Bolinger, Dwight. 1975. Aspects of Language. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. p241
	2	Calvin, Sam and Dan Robertson. 1978. Computers in a large school system 1966-1980. AEDS Monitor, 17, (4,5,6), pp22-3.
	3	Chapin, Ned. 1971. Computers, a Systems Approach. New York: Van Nostrand.
	4	John E. Nicholls, The Structure and Design of Programming Languages, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1975
	5	Perlis, Alan. 1978. Almost perfect artifacts improve only in small ways: APL is more French than English. A talk given at the APL'78 Conference in Los Altos CA on 1978, March 29.
	6	Quine, Willard Van Orman. 1960. Word and Object. New York: John Wiley and Sons. p77.
	7	Tarbell, Donald E. 1977. The computer hobbyist—will he be left behind? Proc IEEE COMPCON. New York: IEEE. pp302-4.