I suppose that this post is a continuation of the one on old software and books.
The Turing programming language (named after Alan Turing) was developed at the University of Toronto as an introductory language for teaching computer programming at the high school level. It was (and apparently still is) widely used in Ontario.
I had actually won this software package in a University of Toronto programming contest in high school.
The difficulty with teaching computer programming to high school students is that skill levels will vary widely among the students. Students who already know how to program are probably already familiar with C/C++, Pascal, Basic, or Java, and would find a teaching language such as Turing very confining. These students likely know far more about how to program than the teacher does. At the other end of the class, there are students who barely know how to type, and they’re unlikely to pick up very many programming concepts no matter how simple the language they’re taught with.
At least, that was the situation back when I was in high school. Given the proliferation of personal computers and other consumer electronic devices such as cell phones, today’s teenagers are, on average, much more tech-savvy than before. And so the knowledge gap between the best students and the teacher (a technologically-behind-the-times adult) might be even worse than when I was in high school. But on the other hand, the latest crop of today’s high school teachers also come from the first generation to grow up with widespread personal computing technology, so maybe the playing field has been leveled somewhat.
The objected-oriented extension of Turing was a new product at the time. (I had version 1 of the software.) By the time it rolled out, however, C++ had been around for a while, and Java was about to appear. So anyone who was intent on learning object-oriented programming had better options.
And, generally speaking, students don’t like to learn languages designed for teaching because they understand that the minor possible increase in ease of learning comes with a very steep reduction in economic payoff. Nobody will pay you to be a great programmer in Turing, but even a mediocre C++ or Java programmer can make a decent salary.
My friends and I wrote numerous programs — mainly games — in Turing, which we shared amongst ourselves. Unfortunately, I’ve lost many of them, or they’re on floppy disks which I no longer have the hardware to read.
The software and reference books are now available for free at the web site for Holt Software, the company which used to produce Turing.
– davinci 11785
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