I use Eiffel! and other "strange tongues"!

[Jakob Engblom <jakob@docs.uu.se>]

Jon S Anthony wrote:
> 
> In article <Pine.SGI.3.95.970730073454.15333B-100000@shellx.best.com> Brian Rogoff <bpr@shellx.best.com> writes:
> 
> > On Wed, 30 Jul 1997, Glenn Williamson wrote:
> > > ... about Eiffel ...
> >
> > > However, In my opinion, it is the perfect language to teach the
> > > principles of Object-Oriented Programming. While C and C++ may dominate
> >
> > But what if you think that there is far more to programming than OOP? That
> > functional, constraint, and logic programming are equally important
> > "paradigms"?
> 
> Exactly.  Actually, functional, IMO, is significantly more important
> than OO.
> 

In  my opnion, Eiffel is a wonderful OO language, with a nice syntax and
some very powerful support for proper Software Engineering built-in.  It
was designed by people who knew what they were doing, and as a teaching
language it IS superb, just like PASCAL is a good beginning of
programming imperative. 

But still OOP is perhaps a paradigm, but I would rather say an
orthogonal concept to the various calculation models used out there:
functional, imperative, logical, stackbased, assembler,
constraint-based.

Another orthogonal concept is parallellism, and its stronger brother
distribution.

A few examples: 
  Erlang (www.ericsson.se/erlang) is processbased and functional.
  Ada 95 is OOP, Imperative and parallel
  CLOS is functinal and OOP
  Oz (http://www.sics.se/~seif/oz.html) is functional, logical, OOP, 
     parallel and distributed

I think that a computer science student should be comfortable
programming everything from assembly language to PROLOG, and be able to
add concepts like inheritance, object-orientation, parallelism and data
hiding across the board. 

Teaching PROGRAMMING in C or C++ is ridiculous, as you get bogged down
in silly details. If you're students need it, they will learn it on
their own. The job of the university is to teach concepts that will
last, and not todays high-fashion languages. 

Use the language best suited for each field to teach it, and give your
students a broad view of the exciting field of programming and
programming languages. 

/jakob


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