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From: seebs@solutions.solon.com (Peter Seebach)
Subject: Re: What's the best language to start with? [was: Re: Should I learn
 C or Pascal?]
Date: 1996/08/14
Message-ID: <4urn70$dhi@solutions.solon.com>#1/1
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references: <31FBC584.4188@ivic.qc.ca>
 <01bb8854$c2f6b880$87ee6fce@timpent.airshields.com> <32
 <01bb8923$e1d34280$87ee6fce@timpent.airshields.com>
organization: Usenet Fact Police (Undercover)
reply-to: seebs@solon.com
newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.unix.programmer,comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-08-14T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <01bb8923$e1d34280$87ee6fce@timpent.airshields.com>,
Tim Behrendsen <tim@airshields.com> wrote:
>We have the world that you want.  This is CS curriculum today; are
>you happy with the level of expertise of the graduates?  I'm not,
>based on my experience with trying to hire them.  If you're not
>either, what do you think the reason is?

I don't know for sure what a CS curriculum is today.  If it's anything like
psych, the first problem is that students aren't taking enough philosophy and
math classes, and aren't learning basic analytic skills like decomposition.
If you can't take a problem and break it down into parts, you can't do
anything.

I don't see assembly as a better model than English for learning this.  I see
the problem as being a tendancy to focus on concrete problem solving in any
number of languages, and no real study to the art that unifies the languages.
A programmer taught in such a curriculum knows some languages and not others,
but would need a class to learn any new language.  This is probably not ideal.

-s
-- 
Peter Seebach - seebs@solon.com - Copyright 1996 - http://www.solon.com/~seebs
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