On real teaching

Nice post by John Naughton (whose blog drove my interest in tech — for good and bad). (FORTRAN was my first introduction to computing.)

Tomas Kurtz, a great computer scientist and mathematician has died at the age of 96. Together with a Dartmouth colleague, John Kemeny. He created BASIC, the first human-friendly programming language, and the first general-purpose time-sharing system. He and Kemeny had an idea that was then (1963) pretty radical: “The target (in computing) was research, whereas here at Dartmouth we had the crazy idea that our undergraduate students who are not going to be technically employed later on should learn how to use the computer. Completely nutty idea.” But to make that idea work, they had to design a programming language that was much less austere and arcane than FORTRAN and ALGOL.So they created BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code).