Strangely, I never learned Pascal. I would have, if I'd taken the Computer Math II class that my high school offered (Computer Math I, aka "BASIC programming", was a required course for honors students), but the year I planned to take it (junior year), only four students signed up -- and one, my then-boyfriend, moved to Utah just before the school year started, so there weren't enough students to justify paying a teacher for it. I could have tried again my senior year, but I wanted to take both second-year chemistry and second-year physics, so there was no room in my schedule.
Computer Math I was also the course where I kept getting in trouble for finishing the assignments within the first few minutes of class and spending the rest of the hour either playing Wing Commander, exploring the network, or writing BASIC programs that annoyed other people. Halfway through the semester I got pulled aside and asked "okay, since you obviously already know everything on the syllabus, what do you really want to be doing in here?" I said, "I hear there's this language called C..." and they sat me down in another room with an ancient copy of the Borland compiler and a softcover book that someone had probably gotten off the shelf at Barnes and Noble (it was not K&R). My high school wasn't much to write home about when it came to CS; it was really only by an improbable string of coincidences that I ended up in software engineering at all.
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Date: 2009-12-27 05:59 pm (UTC)Computer Math I was also the course where I kept getting in trouble for finishing the assignments within the first few minutes of class and spending the rest of the hour either playing Wing Commander, exploring the network, or writing BASIC programs that annoyed other people. Halfway through the semester I got pulled aside and asked "okay, since you obviously already know everything on the syllabus, what do you really want to be doing in here?" I said, "I hear there's this language called C..." and they sat me down in another room with an ancient copy of the Borland compiler and a softcover book that someone had probably gotten off the shelf at Barnes and Noble (it was not K&R). My high school wasn't much to write home about when it came to CS; it was really only by an improbable string of coincidences that I ended up in software engineering at all.