Pascal is for Poets

That motto, "Pascal is for Poets" once adorned a T-shirt belonging to a colleague of mine at Georgia Tech by the name of Gus Baird. I had recently started work at the Research Institute there, and in addition to doing design and coding work on an Army intelligence system designed the ANUYK-71 (known affectionately to us as Micro-Fix), I had the good fortune to be assigned to assist Prof. Baird in teaching a class in Pascal to the 82nd Airborne at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina in the early 80's.

"What will I be doing?", I asked Ed Shanahan, my supervisor at GTRI.

"Just help set up the computers and keep them running," he answered. "You'll probably need to help the students with their lab work."

"Sounds easy enough," I said. "I've had plenty of practice doing that during my VA work-study program days. Do you really think Gus can teach a bunch of Army folks how to program in Pascal in just a week?"

"I hope so," Ed said, "That's what they are paying us to do. All of the people they are sending are supposed to have prior computer experience, so it should be possible."

Ed, Gus, a couple of Tech student assistants, and I met in a hotel outside Ft. Bragg on the Sunday prior to the first day of the new class. Ed and Gus had just gotten back from a meeting on the base, and they were obviously not happy. Apparently, the Army had not, in fact, sent all people with prior computer experience, but about half the class had never even touched a computer before. Mind you, this was 1982, and that was still the norm for most of society.

"There has been a change of plans," Ed said looking at me. "We'll have to divide the class in half, and you'll be teaching the people with no prior experience. Gus will continue as planned so that the experienced people get what the government paid for."

"Meanwhile, ten hours from now, I'll be lecturing to a bunch of malcontents who probably didn't even ask to be sent to this class, for eight hours a day for five days without a lesson plan," I pointed out.

"That's about the size of it," Ed laughed. "We figure you'll be lucky to be able to teach them how to turn it on in a week."

After a restless night, I found myself in front of a varied group of uniformed individuals. They were initially well behaved until the Captain who was in charge of the educational center left. Then, as I began the first tentative attempts at introducing them to fundamental computer principles, the heckling began. Some of the students had been sent to the class under a time-honored Army tradition of sending those who would be least missed. Some of them knew this, and resented it and the fact that they had been immediately put in the "dummies" group.

Somehow I got though that first day. The second day was better; with most of the basic concepts of computing like binary arithmetic, boolean logic, and the Von Neumann architecture having already been covered, the students seemed glad to begin learning the UCSD Pascal language that was available on the Apple II. Surprisingly, it didn't take long to cover the entire language. Pascal is, after all, designed to be a small and easy to teach language, the number of reserved words being less than 40 in most implementations.

I found that the trick to holding the students interest was to keep it real. I had to be able to point to something useful that the Apple II could be made to do by each person in the class by Friday. The answer was something that was not readily available in the early days, a database. Most people can think of some part of their daily work that could be made easier if only they had a custom database to automate it, and my "sweat-hogs" were no exception.

In the next classroom, Prof. Gus Baird was giving the experienced people the full university level course in Pascal, albeit somewhat abridged. From our combined lab sessions, I gathered some of them were having a tough go of it. I believe the expression we used was "a sip from the fire hose." I never had the opportunity to sit in on one of Gus's classes, but I gather he was very knowledgeable, focused, and quite entertaining. His background of writing weapons guidance software had given him a lot of interesting stories, an appreciation for attention to detail, and a low tolerance for error prone programming habits. To him, Pascal code done right was poetry.

Meanwhile, my students were learning the basics of Input/Output using text and then binary methods. The Bell-and-Howell "Black" Apple II computers that the Army had acquired, by the clever trick of using education funds to circumvent the usual Army bureaucracy, had floppy disk drives, which made them as powerful as most small computers of the time. We quickly moved on to searching and sorting techniques, and finally user interface design. Before I knew it, Friday had come and it was time for them to take the final exam that was required to get a training certificate. Nearly three quarters of the class managed to pass the final exam.

Like others who have had the opportunity to teach, I sometimes wonder what my students did when they left the class. Did any of them go back to their posts, clutching their own floppy disk full of database source code, and create wonderful automations, and then go on to become professional programmers? Did it seem as miraculous to them as it did to me that it was possible to learn so much in such a short time? When I think back on it now, it seem hard for me to believe what can be accomplished when you don't know what can't be done.

If any of those students did go on to study programming at a university, they surely found it to be a far different experience. You can't take an advanced programming course until you have had an introductory programming course, and you can't take the intro until you have met the prerequisites. It may take a full year before they are allowed to get back to the level of that Friday. At some universities I know, they may never get beyond that basic level.

Strange as this tale sounds in these times, it wasn't unusual then. Many others tell the same story of how quickly even middle school students respond to teaching programming rather than "using computers" as we do today, and of how empowering it is to both teach and learn to take control of the computer with our own hands. We have lost the simple innocence of those early microcomputer years, mired in the complexity of modern layered software where, far from controlling the machine, you are controlled by it.