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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."
Better to use a well understood language by the teachers, than introduce new students to a language the TAs haven't used before.
Teach the concepts, not the language.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
The problem isn't that a C# class would be offered, or even that a C# class would be part of the required curriculum.
The problem is that the school agreed to make a C# class part of the required curriculum in return for money.
Schools have no business selling access to their students' minds in this fashion.
Because C/C++, despite their widespread use, are not all that great choices for application languages. The biggest thing they have going for them is that they're fast and have lots of libraries available. OTOH, they aren't the quickest language in the world to debug, they have a pretty weak type system, there are a lot of minor incompatibilities in compilers...
Perl/PHP are fine...but as you said, for web apps (or perl for scripts). Not well suited for general app dev.
A lot of people don't like python, and python is not what you'd call blazing fast.
Javascript is a joke. It's for annoying web page junk.
Java is the closest thing to a modern application language -- it's compiled, it does bounds checking and whatnot, but it has a few severe flaws. It's very memory-hungry. Despite years of improvements and promises, it's still awfully slow compared to C/C++. It puts too much emphasis (IMHO) on architecture/design, like OO and interface design, which is awfully overwhelming to new CS students.
We need an applications language. It can't be hideously slow (like most of these proposed C/C++ replacements), so at most it could do RTTI and array bounds checking at runtime. If you have a really expressive language, your compiler can go gonzo optimizing, a la Eiffel or SML or Ocaml.
It'd be nice if it had a somewhat less foreign interface -- SML and Ocaml are a bit much to swallow if you're used to C.
C# -- dunno about performance implications, but it's gotten grudging approval from some language people I know -- seems like it might do a good job of filling the gap that Java tried to fill.
Of course, I'd much rather a non-MS language become big...
May we never see th
Java is already proven and adopted industry-wide. C# is not. MS is being called out for attempting to gain a bit of de facto acceptance by the old 'indoctrinate the youth' ploy. All those saying, 'what's wrong with more languages being taught', I say, go invent a language and see if you can get it taught as a required course a year later at any university.
LEXX
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
I second the other posters that the first programming langauges taught should be Scheme AND assembly language (though I would probably recommend MIPS instead of x86). I have heard that Berkeley does exactly this. First semester you learn Scheme. Second semester you learn assembly langauge. If you can survive/master those two languages, then all other languges will simply fall somewhere in between on the spectrum of programming langauges.
cpeterso
Sun owns Java
Sun owns the Java trademark, not the language/APIs/specifications, as I suspect you well know.
The C# standard is of limited value because it is such a small part of Dotnet, and unlike Java, other vendors aren't producing Dotnet implementations.
The difference is real diversity in the market vs. fig leaf endorsements.