In 1973, I spent 9 months at the University of Waterloo, home of Watfor. I taught a course in "Advanced Application Techniques" -- the language was FORTRAN, and the techniques included such things as using libraries and handling errors in input data...
When I left for Canada, there had been a lot of discussion about programming style at the labs, and so in my first lecture I told the students that I would award points for style, and briefly talked about what that was and how I would assess the style, and I did so throughout the course.
What amazed me was that some students seemed to instantly get the idea, and became quite good at producing excellent, clean programs, while others were violently allergic to the whole notion that anything "subjective" should stand between them and their grade in the class. I remember several interchanges with students, often angry, who had a lot of difficulty understanding why their 35-line solution to a problem should get a lower grade than a 15-line version (excluding comment lines).
in fairness, I didn't (and don't) know any better way to learn style than doing a lot of reading, a lot of writing, and getting criticized constructively by those with more experience. For me, a lot of what I learned was from Stan Brown at the Labs, who read piles of my (atrocious) FORTRAN code and repeatedly pointed out that when you wrote a program, you were not just communicating with the computer, but also other humans (including yourself) who would read (and perhaps modify) the code in the future...
Steve
----- Original Message -----
From:
"Doug McIlroy" <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu>
To:
<lm@mcvoy.com>, <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu>, <clemc@ccc.com>
Cc:
<tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent:
Fri, 05 May 2017 22:02:21 -0400
Subject:
Re: [TUHS] Discuss of style and design of computer programs from a user stand point [was dmr note on BSD's sins]
Clem wrote, "So, I wonder do any of the schools like Darthmouth and the like
teach courses that study 'style' and taste in CS."
Some time around 1970, Bob Rosen instituted a program-reading
course at the University of Iowa, by overt analogy to the
study of literature. Style was certainly a central concern;
I'm not sure about the deeper matter of taste. I'm not aware
of other examples, except perhaps for a collaboration between
Don Kunth and a teachaer of (I think) creative writing--a
course whose content I can't recall.
Doug