Comments on: In memory of CESIL

By: Andrew Jacobs

Andrew Jacobs — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 10:31:04 +0000

I’ll see if I can find the time to create a SWING version of the Visual CESIL GUI. There should be a Java runtime available for the Pi, its certainly an option on other ARM Linux distributions. My Pi is ordered but I have no idea when it will be delivered.

By: closingbraces

closingbraces — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:34:12 +0000

I’m delighted to see the current moves to re-introduce real programming into school, and quite tickled by the idea of CESIL on Raspberry Pi.

It’s quite possible that the “Java based command line CESIL for Windows & *NIX” version of Visual CESIL by Andrew John Jacobs at http://www.obelisk.demon.co.uk/cesil/ could run on Raspberry Pi, or might only need minor adjustments to get it running. At worst something similar probably wouldn’t be that hard to write from scratch.

However, I suspect that these days you’d need something far more whizz-bang for anyone to be interested in it – though perhaps CESIL or something like it might still be useful as one part of a wider curriculum.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 21:35:54 +0000

Just a thought… wouldn’t CESIL be a great thing to start with on one of the new Raspberry Pis …..

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 20:23:30 +0000

I have enjoyed reading comments about CESIL and other school computer education items. I was one of the pioneers teaching about computers in a Rayleigh, Essex school as early as May 1966. I had made a switch operated binary adder and showed that in Maths lessons before doing some computer stuff. None of it official though. I’m 69 now and pleased to see programming and Computer Science returning to schools’ timetables. I did teach IT but was concerned about being a possible company rep. ie promoting on companies IT software.

To me programming is the ultimate computer game!!! Making “it” do as it is told even if the task is trivial.

By: Yorick Phoenix

Yorick Phoenix — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 06:57:09 +0000

I think – and have always felt – that it is important for programmers to understand how computers work and what better way than to start at the machine level with an assembler or a simple simulator like CESIL. I cut my teeth with it in 1975 then went on to Basic, Fortran, PL/1, Z80, Lisp, etc. When I needed to learn 6502, 68000 and work in PowerPC assembly for some interrupt routines I wasn’t phased because I had started at this level. Start at C++ or Java and Assembly or Hardware Interrupts will scare you. You can go higher-level but it is harder to go lower-level if you haven’t already been there.