Re: Role of CAS in education: was Re: Historical CAS question

carlos_at_colorado.edu
Date: 01/30/05 

Date: 30 Jan 2005 10:50:32 -0800

You have not paid attention to what I said. Read my lips. A CAS is
used in those courses strictty as a *high level calculator tool*: do an
integral, solve this differential equation, multiply two symbolic
matrices, find roots, display results. We are not talking about string
theory or chess here.

Going deeper into true *system programming* is another thing
completely. I went through the process. In graduate school at
Berkeley I learned a new toy called Fortran II in about two hours on my
own from a book written by Dan McCraken. Got some IBM cards, went to
the keypunch and wrote a program from scratch to sort 10 numbers for
the homework.

It took me over six months to learn to put together a program for my
thesis, about 20k lines. It took me 15 more years to learn true system
integration, and work on real-time systems of several million lines at
industry.

In that respect little has changed since. Humans are still humans.
Learning the basics of any language takes hours (well - maybe C++ is
the exception). It takes years to master, if your career happens to
take you into a system programming path (99% of engineering students
wont; a current exception being embedded systems).

What is new in 40 years is that learning a high level system like a
CAS, Matlab, IDL or SAS lets the student do *far more with the basics*
In 1964 it took me 1 hr to keypunch the bubble sort and job control
cards on an IBM 026, and took 3 batch runs (1 run per day) to gets the
bugs out. Now I say sort(a): 1 second.