Microsoft Invests in the University of Waterloo

saforrest writes "Say goodbye to independent academia. In a presentation by Microsoft on Wednesday at the University of Waterloo, a new joint initiative was announced which involves the addition of a mandatory course on C# for all electrical and computer engineers. 'Completion of this course will be mandatory for students entering the E&CE program.'" Microsoft's press release is available.

Comments

Re:Academic Integrity

[Succa]

Waterloo has no academic integrity. As someone who just graduated from UW's Comp Sci program two weeks ago, I can tell you that UW's once-esteemed CS program is starting to resemble a diploma factory. The university admins have increased their quota for industry-pandering by 1000% since I first joined the school. All of a sudden, perfectly good courses started getting tainted by the touch of Java (the AI course comes to mind, switching to Java because it "looks better on a resume" than Scheme), phasing out theory courses, and generally eliminating academic mainstays like Lisp, ML, and the like. And now C#? I'd heard this rumour quite some time ago, and I feared it would come true. Luckily it's only the Comp/Elec Eng program (which tends to focus on industry more than theory) affected; were MS forcing C# on Comp Sci students, the program would be reduced to a joke. I just hope my newly acquired degree doesn't become completely worthless in the next few years.

Re:At least C# is (probably) useful

[Zeinfeld]

Relevant to what? How much production code out there uses C#? How many people will still be programming in C# 20 years from now?

I would suspect that there is already more C# production code than Modula 3 code. Redmond has been using C# internally for quite a while.

Nobody raised any questions when comp sci courses chucked out Wirthless languaqges like pascal and Modula in favor of Java. And when it comes to proprietary control of a language only a complete slashweenie can pretend that Java is an open language when Sun uses the courts to enforce proprietary control.

C# does have one major feature that Java does not, meta data and reflection. Now those are not features that many programmers who have not used the Lisp machine are familiar with but it is a very powerful way to program.

The point is that in the past five years it has become possible to teach computer programming courses using languages that are both clean in design and relevant commercially. Modula and pascal were botched from start to finish.