Subject: Finally an aptitude test for programming?

From: Omer Zak <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2006 03:20:10 +0300

It is well known that it is impossible to use currently available tools
to test for ability to program computers.

In their paper
http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf, Dehnadi and
Bornat claim to finally have a test, which can predict one's ability to
program.

It would be very interesting if the volunteers, running various
programming courses in schools and MATNASim, can administer similar
tests to their pupils and report correlations to actual programming
ability at end of the courses.

Note to self:  the following are the major semantic hurdles, which trip
up novice imperative programmers:
1. Assignment and sequence.
2. Recursion/Iteration.
3. Concurrency.
(I wonder whether there are any interesting additional concepts hiding
after the 3rd one.)

Novice declarative programmers have to leap the following semantic
hurdle:
- Argument substitution.

                                             --- Omer
-- 
You haven't made an impact on the world before you caused a Debian
release to be named after Snufkin.
My own blog is at http://tddpirate.livejournal.com/

My opinions, as expressed in this E-mail message, are mine alone.
They do not represent the official policy of any organization with which
I may be affiliated in any way.
WARNING TO SPAMMERS:  at http://www.zak.co.il/spamwarning.html