Re: Please Help.

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Richard said

<<Unfortunately, here students _are_ about to dictate curriculum content.
Ada has been judged 'not good on my CV, not sexy' and the department has
decided to switch to Java next year because it will be popular with the
students.  (Given that one of my ex-students, _not_ one of the world's
great programmers, is now getting TWICE what I do, writing Java for a
bank, I begin to see their point.)

>I do think that it is nice for students to be able to write interesting
>programs without too much fuss, but unbounded strings are hardly a
>prerequisite to this!

When you are trying to stave off a Java takeover, you clutch even at strings.>>

I don't think you can stave off a Java takeover by featurism!

Note incidentally that if salaries are the indication of what to teach, there
is no question that we should teach COBOL, at least for the next decade while
the Y2K mess is figured out. A competent student with good COBOL knowledge
can write their own ticket at the moment -- of course not many universities
could BEGIN to equip a student with the necessary knowledge!

I perfectly well understand the phenomenon you are describing though. Very
few professors of computer science know much about programming, or how to
teach programming, and even fewer know about how to teach beginning 
programming. So the people making decisions about what language to teach
to beginners are very much in the position of the blind (professors who
don't know) leading the blind (students who don't know either).

Under such circumstances, teaching the students what they think they might
need to know, without knowing anything about how to make this choice, is
not such a surprising outcome. 

Using salaries and/or popularity of programming languages as a guide is
at least objective, but it leads to different results.

By *far* the most widely used language for application development is
Visual Basic.

By *far* the best bet for salaries (given the Y2K mess) is COBOL.

But of course most of the faculty who make the decisions know nothing about
either of these two possibilities, so in fact that decision making mechanism
does not work very well.

Java is not such a terrible language for teaching. If you have some insrtuctors
who are sufficiently enthusiastic about teaching Java, then it's an OK choice,
certainly much better than C or C++. For me, the weakness of Java as a teaching
language is that it has too narrow a view of the world, and in particular is
too far committed to limited paradigms, but still, I think that enthusiasm
on the part of the *teachers* is a crucial element.