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Crack

While listening to Advaitic Songs by Öm and reading the ACM article “Teaching two programming languages in the first CS course” it reminded me of my faux lesson plan for a college course that no one would ever hire me to teach. In this course students would indeed use and learn two programming languages: one language used to write another language. Preferably the two languages would be of differing paradigms, e.g. procedural -> functional, functional -> logical. The reason for this is that the implemented language should expose the downfalls of the implementation language for certain kinds of problems, and vice versa. I have not written a syllabus.

As a kid my mother worked with a guy who was into cracking Commodore 64 games. Since I had a C64 he told her that he’d be happy to hook me up with free software and sent her home with a 30+ page list of warez that he had in his collection. I remember looking at the list and drooling at the long list of games that he had, but for some reason I was more interested in checking out the “business software.” I had played games and I knew what they had to offer, but business software was a different beast. So one day he sent a few disks home jam packed with word processors, spreadsheets, tax software, and the like. I spent hours exploring those programs (without manuals) and feel like I learned a lot about interface design and revelatory purpose in software. I guess I’m just not much of a game player.

:F