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That's awesome. I am looking forward to following this. He can certainly learn quite a lot of the supporting theory working with just pencil and paper... ...an

That's awesome. I am looking forward to following this. He can certainly learn quite a lot of the supporting theory working with just pencil and paper... ...and submitting a program for "compilation by email" is very old school, like our punch card days, only a bit slower.

Jtsummers 12y ago
And it has the added benefit of forcing thinking before executing. Along with a potentially very forgiving "compiler". In college at GT prior to 2002 (2003?) the intro class was taught using a pascal based pseudocode. The TAs grading it were necessarily lenient on issues of syntax and the students could focus on the semantics of the program. Need a function that interacts with the outside world (reads a character, draws a figure to a screen, whatever)? Just say that's what it does and it does it. This leaves the student with a solid understanding of algorithms and data structures, and in the follow-on courses they can worry about stricter syntax (language and APIs).