Daniel’s Blog

Prof. Hong Zhu speaks out about the role of Delphi as a first year programming language at Oxford Brookes University:

Dear Daniel,
In response to your call for discussions, my personal view on this issue is
that:
First, we are teaching programming using Delphi environment and OO extended Pascal as the programming language for practical and lecturing purposes. A significant difference must be made between teaching a programming language and programming. Although I have made this clear in my lectures, this difference is often not being taken seriously by some students. Our main purpose of choosing the specific language/environment is to ease the learning curve for the students to understanding principles of programming and basic concept of programming languages underlying all specific languages, and to help with the students to develop good habits and skills of programming. It is not entirely for teaching a language that is just suitable for the current trend in the industrial practices, which tend to change from time to time, while the principles and fundamental concepts and skills last much longer. A good understanding of these principles and basic concepts will enable our students to adapt to any programming language without major difficulties and to learn new programming languages that maybe developed in the future in their whole career of lifetime.

Second, it is well understood that the importance of the first programming language(s) and the multiple criteria situation in the choice of the first language to be offered to the students. The selection of Delphi was the result of careful balancing among many factors according to the criteria. It involved almost all academic staffs in a research a few years ago on the issue and the selection was a collective decision. Since then, we are constantly reviewing our uses of programming language(s) taught and used in our modules in the programming subject group. Further development in this direction is under the way towards more choices for the students to select from using one of two possible languages as the first language in order to satisfy our students’ requirements. Here, I must point out that our students may well have different requirements than students of other universities in UK or more widely in the world. We are aware of the differences on the uses of programming languages in teaching between the universities around the world as our academic staffs are actively involved in the research on programming languages. For example, Mr. David Lightfoot is an internationally well-known expert in the area of programming languages.

Finally, I would like to say that I appreciate your efforts in initiating a discussion on this issue, which I believe will improve the communications between lecturers and students. In addition to the list of such information, I would like to suggest you and the Brookes Computing Society to gain more Information about the students’ specific requirements on the uses of the first programming languages. That will help us to make the right decisions. The above are my personal views, thus do not represent the opinions of other lecturers or the department.
Best wishes,
Hong

So they are his views. Hong is a lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, he teaches modules about programming (using Delphi) and he also teaches about requirements capture, formal methods and software design.

His email came as a response to my list of first year programming languages at universities, which I blogged about here.

I would like to reiterate again, that it is my view that the theory and the ability to implement is more important than the language. However, it is very important for schools of computing to carefully think about which programming language and they should be able to justify a particular language.

Technorati Tags: oxfordbrookes, programming, languages

I have started to construct a list of programming languages found in first year undergraduate computing/computer science/software engineering degrees. Please see this website for a list:

https://www.vanirsystems.com/ProgLangsUnis.html

Please get in contact with me:

• If you are a current student at a university and don’t see the first year languages of your university (or I have made a mistake)
• Are a prospective student of a university not listed and would like me to find them out for you (or you have found them out)

If you are a prospective student then please do not judge an institution based on the programming language that they teach. A course is all about the theory that they teach, and its all about the ability to implement something and not in any particular programming language.

This list arose out of a discussion about whether or not a particular programming language should be required for courseworks which shouldn’t actually test whether you know a particular language but should test that you can implement it. (For example, an Agent Technology system should not really need the requirement of being in the Delphi programming language, as the student could develop an agent and its environment in any language he/she likes (e.g. java, ruby, C#, C++… anything really)).

Feel free to comment here if you would like to add to the list, alternatively feel free to skype or email me. My contact details are on my business page: https://www.vanirsystems.com/

Thanks,

Daniel

(this list has kind of evolved from thoughts within the Brookes Computing Society)

Technorati Tags: undergraduate, firstyear, programming, languages, computing, computerscience, brookescomputingsociety

Here is a comparison between some system implementations of wxStaticText::GetLabel.
Code is taken from the CVS for 2.8.2 Pre-release, but should not be different for 2.8.0 (and we will probably be moving to 2.8.2 soon anyway)

click here if you can’t see the above iframe

This is a post for the wxCocoa@Brookes team.

So I am teaching some C, some Object Oriented Techniques and some Objective-C to a bunch of computing students. I am kinda looking forward to it, because I really want to get into tutoring and research (and maybe eventually lecturing). This is for the computing society, because we have an open source project to do.

At the moment I am not feeling to good, I woke up like it… not sure what is going on. Hopefully I will be ok for the lunchtime tutorage, and the mealage tonightage. Hopefully a cup of tea will sort me out.

I (hopefully) get my tesco vouchers today, from my work in (Brookes) week 0.

I had my PhD meeting yesterday, unfortunately the department doesn’t get enough funding to be able to fund me… so I am going to have to find my own funding from organisations/companies, but they are going to help me a little. Not the news that I wanted really, but I think I should be able to get funding for my project. I worked out that I would need at the very least about £9500 per year to be able to survive, and that is for 3 years. This would cover fees and living/surviving costs. Would you like to fund me or partial-fund me?
Picture from: https://taiirei.livejournal.com/profile

Howdie everyone!

If anyone has Objective-C experience and would like to be involved in an Open Source Project then please let me know. Thankies.

I need sleep… but there are more important things right now.

Talk soon

I am really enjoying being a guider. I love to help people, especially in a student environment. I have met some really cool people.

Hopefully the new computing freshers will join up to the Brookes Computing Society. We have set up a few events (inc. a LAN gaming event), and I hope to get a good turn out for all of them. Heres the compsoc website: https://www.brookescomputingsociety.org/

I also love Brookes, I never realised how much. Also the staff are so friendly here, they really are.

Technorati Tags: brookescomputingsociety, freshers, oxfordbrookes

The computing society now has a shop selling clothes and gifts thanks to Vanir Systems. Its linked in with the wiki, the forum and the main page. But here is the direct page:

https://www.brookescomputingsociety.org/shop.html

Its all going well, the freshers should start appearing tomorrow. In fact, i know that they will. I am doing the Guiding for the Computing and Mathematics department - I have a very red t-shirt! See picture:

If you are reading this and are a fresher (2006) at Oxford Brookes, and see me - then say hello

Technorati Tags: brookescomputingsociety, oxfordbrookes, university, oxfordbrookesuniversity, oxford, freshers

I have just sorted out the Brookes Computing Society Website:

https://www.brookescomputingsociety.org/

We now have:

• A Wiki powered by MediaWiki, which will be the main part of the site
• A Forum powered by Vanilla Forum

It is also being hosted by the Computing Department at Brookes. Its on a server called Tardis (a Sun Microsystems Machine powered by Debian).

I guess I should add this to my Vanir Systems portfolio, as technically I have made most of it, and I maintain it… but it is all volunteer work.

I still need speakers for ComputerWeeks06, a two week long event where we have speakers from the computing industry. Please leave a comment or email me to let me know whether you would like to speak in Oxford, UK (and work/research in an area of the Computing Industry).

Technorati Tags: brookescomputingsociety, computingsociety, compsoc, univerisity, oxfordbrookes, oxfordbrookesuniversity, nus, obsu