From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,6c13cc000274246b X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Please Help. Date: 1997/09/16 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 273005726 References: <01bcbcde$f8a425c0$ca70fe8c@default> <5v2qk5$cpu$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> <5viibu$cbs$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> Organization: New York University Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-09-16T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Richard said <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.