What programming languages should we teach our undergraduates?
John A. Scales, Hans Ecke · The Leading Edge · 2002
We begin by investigating how we teach programming languages now (and what's wrong with it). Consider the following two situations: Student X has 200 data files nnn.dat with nnn ranging from 1 to 200. X wants to transform them to plain text (ASCII) with a program dat2asc which should be called thus for each file: dat2asc nnn.dat nnn.asc. X doesn't know how to accomplish that! Two solutions present themselves to X: generate an Excel spreadsheet with the correct commands—200 nearly identical lines—and write them into a batch file, or type the commands 200 times.