Re: Teaching languages (was: can one build commercial applications with latest gnat and other licenses related questions...)

[M E Leypold <development-2006-8ecbb5cc8aREMOVETHIS@ANDTHATm-e-leypold.de>]

Bj�rn Persson <spam-away@nowhere.nil> writes:

> M E Leypold wrote:
> > Let me also add: Having tought software engineering courses at german
> > universities I wouldn't try to introduce Ada as a teaching language
> > there today: Whereas the language has all it should have, the skill
> > set acquired by the students would be only usable in very restricted
> > scenarios and this in a small market anyway.
> 
> If they were software engineering courses I really hope you taught
> your students something more than a programming language. I was taught

I hope so. We explicitely focused on SE (what was possible in the
restricted time) and tried to work on the language independent
concepts. And at least on an understanding of the problems involved in
constructiong software systematically.

> Scheme, Pascal and Java in university courses. At work I currently use
> C++, and a little Python, Perl and Bash. Yet I do use what I learned
> in those courses: structured programming, information hiding,
> algorithms, data structures and all that. 

> Universities do teach programming languages, because you can't teach
> programming without a language, but the language isn't the skill set
> that the students are supposed to acquire.

I agree. My comment was more in the direction of: A language is a
skill set (few companies today are willing to hire anyone for
programming work who has not at least some experience in the language
they are going to use: Industry these days doesn't believe in the
portability of knowledge -- more in trained monkey reflexes). It would
be a divident if the student can actually use that skill set in
practice. 

> Pascal was designed specifically for teaching,
> and I doubt my teachers expected that I'd ever write commercial
> applications in Scheme. 

> Give your students a good grasp of the

For me that's past tense for some time. :-).

> paradigms and concepts of computer science, and introduce them to a
> few different languages (the more different the better), and they'll

Exactly my saying. Unfortunately students of CS in Germany are rather
unwilling to learn more than one language and the universities don't seem
to see this as necessary.

> be able to apply their knowledge to new languages as needed.

Regards  -- Markus