CP4E was Re: Deitel and Deitel Book...

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Ramkumar" == Ramkumar Kashyap <rkashyap at sympatico.ca> writes:

    Ramkumar> My original intent for starting the thread was because I
    Ramkumar> truly believe in CP4E.

I used to.  Then I started doing I18N.  Then I didn't.  Computers and
humans communicate with other entities in very different ways.

CUse4E is a different matter.  You _can_ program computers to do a
damn good job of translating a human's idea of "precise description"
into something that can be used to efficiently query a database.

But at that point the human is no longer engaged in programming.  A
human dependent on that level of cooperation is not capable of fixing
what's broke.  My 2-1/2 year old daughter was quite capable of drawing
on the screen with the mouse, and was good enough to learn to click
the "close" button once she figured out that made Daddy really proud.
(Now that she's 4-1/2 she's into Lego and makeup.  Go figure....  But
she still turns off the TV when she leaves the room.)

Programmer?  Uh-uh.  Not even Grandma will claim that.

    Ramkumar> The point I want to make is that there are programs like
    Ramkumar> Hooked-on-Phonics, and other remedial language programs
    Ramkumar> that are quite effective in raising the literacy levels
    Ramkumar> among adults.

Which do this precisely by taking all the rigor out, and depending on
intuition and subconscious processes.  "You know it when you see
it"---but you don't know _why_.  Problem is, there is no way to
guarantee that a trained neural network will be a generalization of
the data it was trained on.

Japanese education is heavily oriented to imitate-the-teacher
learning-by-doing.  It shows in their programs (my sample is of course
published free software programs and patches to other free software
programs; I don't know what the professionals are doing---I do know
that it's one field where foreigners are often preferred to natives),
and the way they apparently _can_ not convert their patches to forms
that would be acceptable in an internationalized application.

I don't think this is a biological thing the way the male/female
difference seems to be, and probably not even terribly deeply embedded
in culture.  I don't think it would take much to teach programming to
Japanese high school students.  But I think that it is evidence that
Hooked-on-Python is not going to be a path to CP4E.

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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