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MVP of the Week: Bertie Buitendag

Bertie BuitendagThis week we are spotlighting the work of Bertie Buitendag, our MVP from South Africa. He is a lecturer at Tshwane University of Technology. He was instrumental in the school system adopting Delphi for early education. He also worked to develop the curriculum for teaching computer programming in basic education.

If you check out his blog, he regularly blogs about educational events in South Africa where students and faculty learn more about Delphi. If you check out his YouTube Channel you can see some of the videos he’s put together covering different topics on Delphi.

You can also see Bertie and some of his students from South Africa in the recent Inspire, Develop, Excel video.

If you are interested you can check out the Implementation Plan for Standardising Programming Language for Information Technology for 2015 that provides the argument for using Delphi in schools. It provides a lot of great points.

It was unfortunate that a few schools insisted on staying on Java, but most of them are now standardized on Delphi thanks to Bertie!

5 replies on “MVP of the Week: Bertie Buitendag”

“It was unfortunate that a few schools insisted on staying on Java”

Perhaps it’s not unfortunake to keep diversity.

Btw, would love to hear a podcast with Dalija Prasnikar.

I think it would be great if the students learned a few languages, but the point was that there are advantages to starting with Delphi and then moving to other languages later.

Sure, a podcast with Dalija Prasnikar would be fun. I’ll ask her.

Thanks Jim! I see the point in Pascal as basic language and I’ve glanced at the standardising document you’ve attached. Document sets not only Pascal as a language of choice but also IDE.
What I think is that young people are better to turn to algorithms (knowledge how to achieve things) and language (expressing of algorithms to computer as programs). IDE shouldn’t play 1st role in their education. Of course this is my personal opinion that could be far far away from reality.

Yes, Delphi would be a great programming language for schools. For the most reason that source code is easy to read and also for it’s strong typecasting.
However….
Recently I was instructor on a Multi-day Delphi programming course where I showed several basic topics such as bitmap resizing, -rotation, soft drawing, rotating cilindrical images, spheres painting and the like. See also my website http://www.davdata.nl/math
Each time the source code was 11megabytes, I was not able to reduce this below 7Mb switching debug information off.
If a company starts an application in the morning and closes it at the end of the day, this is not a main disavantage. But in my case: generating many small and basic projects I have my doubts.
What I would like is a different approach: create an utterly simple version of Delphi, one which generates object codes of less than 200Kbytes for empty projects, just as Delphi-3. Allow users to add their own components. Supply this version free of charge. Make different Delphi versions for different platforms: adding them all in one version obscures the basics.
Delphi-10 is no doubt a great product, but I don’t like it and rather keep using Delphi-3 or -7.

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