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What was the first methodology used when you were taught programming? | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 90 comments | Search Discussion
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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday May 22 2018, @09:39PM (4 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday May 22 2018, @09:39PM (#682813)

    They knew they had to start teaching the computer in 1982, but they didn't really know how to go about it. They bought some and told the science teacher to wing it, he read the textbook and made up some stuff. The semester project was an elaborate BASIC program to convert numbers in one of a few bases to their representations in another base. Like binary, octal, hexadecimal and decimal to any of the other bases. He outlined a menu driven structure to select the source base, then for each source base a menu to select one of the three destination bases, then a collection of 12 base to base conversion routines to get the desired answer.

    Just to be a jackass I wrote a 3 line program that converted any base to any base, in the same language on the same machines as the class. I used a logarithm to predict the length of the result so I could imitate the formatting he specified - that made him feel better because he couldn't expect his students to understand a logarithm.

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    Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
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  • (Score: 2) by jasassin on Wednesday May 23 2018, @07:48AM (2 children)

    by jasassin (3566) <jasassin@gmail.com> on Wednesday May 23 2018, @07:48AM (#683001) Homepage Journal

    I used a logarithm to predict the length of the result so I could imitate the formatting he specified

    Do you mean algorithm? I'm confused.

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    jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0x663EB663D1E7F223

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 23 2018, @11:31AM (1 child)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday May 23 2018, @11:31AM (#683053)

      Log base N is related to the number of digits required to represent a given number in base N.

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      Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/

      • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 27 2018, @01:13AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 27 2018, @01:13AM (#684716)

        Don't feed the trolls

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 24 2018, @08:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 24 2018, @08:32PM (#683736)

    1st experience - borrowed Z80 hooked to TV. Totally clueless 16yo.

    2nd experience - COBOL coding sheets, Nashi-Schneidermann diagrams and top-down design.

    Then I went to college. They had that year redirected two senior statistics lecturers to birth the CS Dept. We learned about PL/1, BASIC and a bunch of theory. PCs were a new thing. The lab has brand new rows of TRS-80 machines. Some of us rebels discovered a Pascal compiler on the VAX. Learned to code efficiently as you got ONE second of CPU. Final year we wrote a "compiler" for a theoretical language. Five years later this big Compiler Project had grown into creating a mini-C compiler (by which time I was long gone).

    Then I got some jobs and REALLY started to learn...