Re: Which first-course languages? (was: What schools use Eiffel (was: No top schools use Ada)) ?

[spencer@ERA.COM (Spencer Allain)]

In article <jyaxda@bmtech.demon.co.uk> scottw@bmtech.demon.co.uk (Scott Wheeler) writes:

   In Article <3n35ja$6u3@theopolis.orl.mmc.com> Theodore Dennison  
   writes:
   >>Miranda????
   >>Languages are kind of a hobby with me, but I have NEVER heard of that
   >>one [Miranda].

   Obscure functional language, as you know now. I had to interview 
   someone yesterday, who's CS course had used only Miranda, Modula-2 and 
   Oberon (Imperial College, London). I think it's an excellent idea to 
   teach using some of these languages (I'm quite keen on Eiffel myself), 
   but we wouldn't even have considered employing him if he hadn't learnt 
   C under his own steam.

   Diverging a little from the subject, could I also put in a plea for 
   anyone designing CS courses to include a little time (couple of days) 
   on the underlying machine representations? Three times now, I've had CS 
   graduates or doctors complaining that their compilers are broken, and 
   found that they were comparing floating point numbers for equality.

   Scott


Ok, so maybe I'm going to get flamed for this, but as a student who used
Modula-2 for all the "real" projects in college, and only took C so I
could learn its disgusting syntax just in case some employer wouldn't
even had considered me without "C knowledge", I have to make a statement.

This is not a personal attack on Scott Wheeler, I don't know him and I hold
no grudge against him, I just want to point out a few things that irk me
about industry.

I'm hoping that the only reason for the statement

   but we wouldn't even have considered employing him if he hadn't learnt 
   C under his own steam.

was because the job involved real-time systems where every millisecond
counts or the company didn't want to invest a couple of weeks teaching
a new person the syntax of a particular language.

This is where the comments about C being fundamentally different than
other languages start getting flung around.  I learned all I needed to
about C _before_ I even took the course in it.  I had taken Assembly
Programming previously, and everyone knows that C was just supposed
to be a "portable" assembly, and it does that pretty well, if you
don't mind abusing the pre-processor.

It is possible to do almost everything in Modula-2 that you can in C.
I don't know the specifics of what you can't do, but they are very
minimal.  Of course, Modula-2 was never ported to many systems, and is
probably the main reason as to why it never flew.  I'm not trying to
say that C is evil, just that companies that hire strictly on the
basis of knowledge of C are just looking to shoot themselves in the
foot.

Actually, anyone who enjoys working with Eiffel, should be thankful for
Modula-2 as many of the concepts came from there, not C.

I'm sure that I've sown the seeds for a language war, but I hope they
never grow.  I don't hate C, or love Modula-2 for that matter.  For
different tasks, one or the other is superior, but I just despise
the thought of companies that believe one language is the end-it-all
and won't even consider hiring people if they don't know it.

Personally, I've found that individuals who have a background in many
languages (ie. different types of thinking) are generally "better"
programmers.  They may not be able to optimize a loop as well as a
hacker who really knows one language, but they often find a way to
remove the loop completely by using a different concept.

I've said too much already, and I apologize to whomever actually read
this far.  This has little to do with comp.lang.{eiffel,ada} and
barely anything to do with comp.edu (too bad I don't get comp.edu), but
it had to be said.

If you have any flames, please send them to me <spencer@era.com>.
Constructive criticism should be the only thing reposted to the net.

-Spencer Allain
Software Engineer
Engineering Research Associates
Vienna, VA  22182