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Will CS Students Switch From Microsoft?
spotter writes: "There's an article in Newsweek International that talks about how Microsoft's tactics are turning off an entire generation of CS students from their products and increasing the fortunes of Linux." The article isn't deep or flawless, but hits on a major point: what students learn in school is key to what they go on to do.
I don't know how it is at most other places, but at the University I attend the labs run NetBSD and KDE2.
I know a few people have copies of MS Visual Studio at home, but why bother, when gcc + emacs is in the labs and you can get it free at home?
Cheers Koz
What I've never understood about Microsoft is why they don't have licenses that give people the opportunity to learn their product. In doing this they are shutting out a huge number of developers (not just students).
Whether you're in school or not, learning about developing in a Microsoft environment requires parting with some cash. Personally I'd love to have copies of Microsoft development tools just so I can learn about the technology, but I'm not going to spend hundreds of dollars on a product just to try it out.
I'll pay media cost, but nothing more. Until they offer that I continue to use other tools and environments for "recreational development". I'd like to learn more about their technology, but they apparently don't want that to happen.
An entire generation of CS students,
.NET or Java is just a shame and shouldn't be called CS.
(and lots of non-CS students) are learning Java.
Any CS diploma/degree that focuses only on a programming language and not general CS theory [e.g. language theory, algorithms and optimizations, number theory, etc...] is not worth anything.
Anyone can learn how to hack in a given language. A true CS student will understand the concepts of a language and will be able to pick up a new language in say 10 hours of practice at the most.
A true CS student will also appreciate that there is more to computers than "the hottest language".
CS is all about "how do I solve this problem with a computer" much like chemistry is about "how do I solve this problem with the basic elements"...
So really trying to focus on
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
An entire generation (mine) learned Pascal in college. The generation before they all learned Fortran.
There is a clear distinction though. You probably learned CS related subjects [algorithms, number theory, data structures, etc..] and did practical work in Pascal.
Whereas many current schools are making the language the sole focus of study.
Saying "I learned CS using C++" is analogous to saying "I studied math in English". The language you program with is just a means to an ends. It is not the end!
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Apple's a perfect example of this. Just because they got University's to buy a lot of boxes didn't make it ripe for students to learn on them.
I was starting college in 1985 and these hot new Macintoshs had just hit the computer lab. They were a dream compared to hacking away on the mainframe with it's handout's of push the PF75 key, blah blah blah. So as a budding young programmer I thought the Mac was the future. I wanted to learn to program it. They had an interpreted C on them that I used, but you really couldn't do much fancy with it. I wanted to go deeper. Turned out you had to buy about $1500 bucks worth of books, compilers and official Mac developer license to really get into the nuts and bolts.
I found a PC in the EE lab. It was wide open. Didn't really have windows, but a C compiler was cheap and the specifications for it were lying around all over the place. I could easily solder something together and have it communicate on the main bus. It didn't have all the expense and proprietary restrictions of the Mac. Had a built in assembly level debugger even. It was a hackers dream-- wide open and pokeable. It was not a great box, but it was cheap and available and easy to get internal information about.
Guess what I learned and pursued on into my career. Guess what type of hardware I'm typing from now. An Intel box that gained popularity along with Microsoft.
The tighter Bill squeezes his claws the more systems that will slip through his fingers. (to paraphrase the wisdom of Star Wars). He will fall the way of Apple.
You're right about a good CS department. A really good one doesn't even teach languages, it should stick to concepts. Languages are just a means to an end.
Shawn
P.S. I quickly got sick of MS boxes and went to work in UNIX. At least UNIX/Linux doesn't crash all the time.
I used to wonder what was so holy about a silent night, now I have a child.
I attend one of the largest universities in the U.S. (and indeed the world) and over the past three years or so, Microsoft has been very busy blitzing our entire school and IEEE and ACM organizations with advertisements, promotions, donations, ... the whole hundred yards. So much of our computing tools (both software and *hardware*) are provided by them. ISOs for XP, Visual Studio, etc. are provided to all of our CS faculty and students freely. On the surface, this seems very good and positive, except that they have an ulterior and very selfish motive - to get the entire next generation our CS students hooked on their proprietary and frequently restrictive and intrusive products, and start developing for their platform thereby strenthening their stranglehold on the industry. Instead of these students to first be exposed and learn to use the openly specified, standardized and frequently free tools, and then later on moving onto any platforms they prefer, all they hear and learn about now is Microsoft (which was never the case until Microsoft became this rich and powerful). I hate to say it, but Microsoft sure knows what they need to do to maintain their monopoly, and they are doing it to the fullest. And the scheme is proving to be fruitful. Over the years (as those "donations" have come), I have seen our CS department in particular and our entire engineering college in general switch slowly but steadily from Unix boxes to PCs (even where we needed the power of the Unix workstations), from Unix to Windows (even where development was traditionally taught in Unix first, everything else later), from Linux PCs to Windows PCs (even though the former were free and simpler to implement and maintain in a multi-user development environment), from gcc to Visual C++ (simply because it has a nice interface and debugger, and MS provided it ->f-reely, the Freedom of gcc notwithstanding)... The list goes on and on. The prognosis, for my school anyway, seems bleak as we move more and more to "the dark side" and increasingly trap ourselves into a world where everything is proprietary, and we only promote the power of the most powerful global corporations at the expense of open, collaborative, community development.
NOT....
I have an autopc.. I wanted to learn a bit about it...
buy VC++ 6.0 Professional $1300.00
buy the Windows CE dev kit $600.00
download the "free" autopc dev kit.
and everyone stands around wondering why the autopc specification that microsoft touted as world changing died a horrible miserable death. because the large bulk of developers out there cant afford $1900.00 to mess with it.
Microsoft tempts you with freebies, that require expensive add-on's or require the "professional" version of the dev studio and will not work with the regular or educational versions intentionally (it's programmed in! it doesn't need professional for the dev kit but the buttwipe programmers locked it to check every time.)
Sorry, if MS wants people to embrace their ideas.. make it FREE or cheap for me to get into it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.