Slashdot Mirror
MS/Waterloo Curriculum Deal On Hold
Plummer writes "After announcing a recent deal with Microsoft that would see C# become a mandatory portion of first year electrical and computer engineering, the University of Waterloo has backed off and asked for a year to evaluate the proposal. The year will be used to evaluate the merits of the language and ensure that any curriculum changes made, will meet the standards UW engineering is known for. The full story here and here."
When I went to school we had whole labs of machines donated by Sun and Intel which no one protested about being out of the ordinary. Similarly there is at least one mandatory classes for CS majors which uses Sun Microsystem's proprietary progamming language and many optional classes as well require Java or strongly suggest it.
:)
Until Slashdot started trying to cause a controversy with the C#/University of Waterloo thing I had assumed this widespread practice in the American university system was taken for granted. Academia is all about politics especially when it comes to the curriculum, technical arguments for or against programming languages are just one slice of the cake. If it wasn't about politics we'd all be learning Lisp and Smalltalk in school instead of C++ and Java. OK, we actually did learn Scheme and Smalltalk at GA Tech so maybe that's a bad example.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this post are mine and do not reflect the opinions, thoughts, strategies or plans of my employer.
At a forum organized by EngSoc, UW President Johnston said that mistakes were made in the announcement of a partnership with Microsoft Canada Co. "In retrospect, it was a mistake to announce an agreement in principle with respect to the curriculum initiatives, a mistake for which I take responsibility."...
Johnston described what will happen in the coming weeks. "What we will have to do over the next few weeks is ensure that the [sic] necessary for any curriculum change occurs, and that those committees, and, ultimately, the Senate that oversees them, are satisfied that the principles that we always must observe when external funding is involved in anything are followed in this case."
That looks like a few weeks, not a year, and it sounds like he wants a rubber stamp:
The MS-UW deal will be talked about at Monday's meeting of Senate, the the university's highest academic body. In early September, the President of UW's faculty association requested a "full airing" of the issue at Senate.
Additionally, MS Candada President Frank Clegg was specific about what the deal means to all 300 incoming freshmen:
The Microsoft Canada Co. sponsorship does require C# to be taught on a platform based on the Windows® operating system.
Replacing C++ for C# in freshmen courses should be worth the entire reputation of the school, far more than $5,000,000. My reputation is worth more than that!
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I am seeing posts along the lines of "Waterloo has finally seen MS's dark side", or "Victory over Greed" etc etc...
But if you read another story on the same page (MS Canada President Frank Clegg responds to top ten questions), Clegg states quite frankly that it was Waterloo who first proposed the idea of C# as a teaching language. So this initiative did not come from MS.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
First of all, I have written a little software in C# and a lot more in Java. C# is a great language in its class and very useful indeed. If you hate it because of M$ say that, but don't say it is a bad language.
;)
That taken care of, I agree with some of the posters saying that it is the concepts that are important. But I also belive that if the concepts to be understood you also have to understand what is behind it all, which includes how a CPU works, how a compiler works, how an interpred language work, and how OO really works.
I think that one should walk this tree with asm, C, BASIC, Ruby, C++/Java/C#, in parallell with the rest of the courses. Try to connect it, for example asm/C with real time and OS courses, while you have ruby for the OO courses.
What language is used should be controlled by the need, not by the industry. Ruby is a great example of an easy to use interpreted language, but also a great example of a language that is VERY object oriented. You get the point without having to figure out other unrelated concepts. Everything really is an object (5.times {|n| print n} for example).
To top off the education it is time for the industry strength languages. C++ is an incredibly powerful language for a number of reasons, but is also very complex and huge in all its quirks. C# and Java would also be good languages to teach now, and to be used as well.
I also want to point out that the choices I have made above when it comes to languages is influenced by what languages I use myself. There are many other excellent languages, so if you like to just exchange your favorite languages to what I have written above
Just to clear up some stuff.
;>)
1) UW was not going to get 10M. MS Canada had announced that they were going to drop 10M to various Canadian institutions, the first announced deal was UW (at around 2.5M i believe). Yes a big chunk of that 10M, but UW has been a supposed "big" MS recruitement center for a long long time. (now you know where all the garbage comes from
2) This story was broadcast on the local tv station the same afternoon it happened, so it was already known quite some time before it showed up in the local paper, slashdot, etc. The minute i heard about it, i felt sick.
3) This was for *engineering* students, not CS students. Somebody was wondering why they don't use pascal or why they don't use java, or c, or c++, or c#, or shell script, etc. DUH! Real programmers are not limited by such things as the local syntax of a language. FYI though, they do use (or use to) Pascal in 1st year CS. Eng. students OTOH used to have a 1st year course in C (may have changed now). Personally, i think its a waste of time for CS students to learn pascal, but engineers should probably be limited to HTML or the like.
Yeah this was probably some infiltration tactic (hey there used to be an door marked "NT Development Lab" in MC a long time ago, maybe there still is?). Anyways, you guys do know all the jokes about engineers trying to program, don't you? LOL!
Zynec
ps - compeng students are omitted from the above slander!