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I'm not the GP, but here's my perspective learning programming in a 3-year technical high school program in Brazil (I had a little bit of exposure before, with

I'm not the GP, but here's my perspective learning programming in a 3-year technical high school program in Brazil (I had a little bit of exposure before, with Windows batch files and shell scripts). We started with a language called Portugol or "structured Portuguese" which is something like a formalized pseudo-code language and was used to teach the basic concepts of structured programming: variables, control flow, subroutines. We spent about three months working with Portugol exclusively, never actually running it on a computer, but just for understanding programming logic. After that we moved to C and eventually "C with classes" C++. Comments were still written in Portuguese. The transition to C was fairly easy in my experience, because the actual English vocabulary you need to understand to program in C is very small, and because the concepts themselves were taught in Portuguese with Portugol, so you only had to do dictionary translation, really.

WorldMaker 8y ago
Seems a shame that there wasn't a Portugol interpreter/compiler handy to at least see things running on a machine before moving to C. Probably would have been a good class assignment to more advanced students to build something like that.
- nerpderp83 8y ago
  How awesome would it have been to be a high performing student, writing programs that a lower performing student would have to execute manually on your simulated computer system. So much good stuff here. Do you want to layout the nand gate or BE the nand gate? Or be the one that decides which problems the nand gate solves?
petethomas 8y ago
That's intriguing to the point I tried to find the relevant web site. Thanks for conveying your experience with it: http://web.archive.org/web/20080212005133/http://gpt.berlios.de http://web.archive.org/web/20080212005133/http://gpt.berlios...
DonHopkins 8y ago
"Portugol" is a great pun on "Algol"! Are there also programming languages called "Portutran" for scientific computing and "Portubol" for business data processing?
- reubenmorais 8y ago
  Yes it is :) We never compiled or ran Portugol (IIRC, it was so vaguely defined that you'd be hard pressed to implement it), so practical matters like how applicable it was to scientific computing or data processing was never a concern.

WorldMaker 8y ago

Seems a shame that there wasn't a Portugol interpreter/compiler handy to at least see things running on a machine before moving to C. Probably would have been a good class assignment to more advanced students to build something like that.

nerpderp83 8y ago
How awesome would it have been to be a high performing student, writing programs that a lower performing student would have to execute manually on your simulated computer system. So much good stuff here. Do you want to layout the nand gate or BE the nand gate? Or be the one that decides which problems the nand gate solves?

petethomas 8y ago

That's intriguing to the point I tried to find the relevant web site. Thanks for conveying your experience with it: http://web.archive.org/web/20080212005133/http://gpt.berlios.de http://web.archive.org/web/20080212005133/http://gpt.berlios...

DonHopkins 8y ago

"Portugol" is a great pun on "Algol"! Are there also programming languages called "Portutran" for scientific computing and "Portubol" for business data processing?

reubenmorais 8y ago
Yes it is :) We never compiled or ran Portugol (IIRC, it was so vaguely defined that you'd be hard pressed to implement it), so practical matters like how applicable it was to scientific computing or data processing was never a concern.