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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."
can we attribute slashdot to this reverse in policy wasnt this story run here and highly criticised. Could it be that while being a totally corrupt school waterloo is more interested in the real industry leaders (read slashdot readership) might think less of their graduates.
Would this tarnished reputation (which this decision wont fix in itself) be worth a nice chunk of ms money? Could this be considered board mismanagement and the such.
Every other academic institution that takes gates'ss's's money has always said it wont affect their product placement (least officially). So why waterloo.
Ubc for example has been taking ms money for years and tons of it. But I dont see things like c# been taught exlcusively or linux being left out of essential training.
Who on the board of waterloo was willing to sell the students out for a new building and a nice retirement package.
It seemed as though UW just hoped that this could go through without anyone really doing much. I mean, with a deal like this, having MS 'donate' $10M to the, wouldn't you want it to happen in front of all the students?
Of course not. You do it at the time when there are the least amount of people on campus (and practically no students), right before the fall term, after summer exams are over. The only reason I had heard of it beforehand was a sign on an 8x11 piece of paper when I came here to bring my sister to an interview.
But it didn't go unnoticed. It took up most of the space in the Imprint (UW's student-run newspaper) and a lot of talk among students. The University just ended up looking like a fool and having to retract to 'think' about what its doing.
But how many people think this will change the final outcome anyway?
The problem with C, C++, C#, Java, and a load of other languages that people are being taught is THIS:
/rant off
You cannot master the language in one semester!
Yes, you can learn the funtimentals, and techinqually, you can learn good programming structures through selective function teaching(i.e. glossing over Goto), but the complexites for most languages prevent mastery of them in only 4 months.
Pascal is B&D, it prevents bad coding techniques by elimating commands that call them. It breaks programmign down to its roots, and with its limited functionality, forces students to plan their code before coding it.
With these features, I'm unsure why people insist on using an industral tool to teach someone basics. I feel like I'm giving students a motorcycle without first giving them a two wheel bike, ahh
(note: all posts to "Why pascal is not my favorite language" will be concidered ~='s)
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Click here, you know you wanna!
When my Freshman year professor in the CS AP class was asked the question, "What language are we going to learn in this class?"
To which he quickly replied, "Any monkey can buy a book and learn a language, what's important is the concepts behind programming. To ask what language your going to learn is to miss the point. If our university focused on teaching a language then we would not be properly teaching our students.
Then my senior year, there was a class we had where every assignment was in a new obscure languages and we were expected to adapt rapidly.
The problem in reality is that most resumes are reviewed for language experience and not conceptual areas. To get a job you need XXX years of language XXX. What a stupid way to hire people, but it's the system and I play the game for a check.
C# is for the Flying Code Monkeys!
I used to wonder what was so holy about a silent night, now I have a child.
But You'll still have to install an (expensive) Mircorsoft compiler. You think they're gonna give that away for free?
;)
Yes, it's right here. It includes C++, C# and the VB.NET compiler. And the C++ compiler can compile to straight x86, but it doesn't do good optimizations either - so it's just like gcc
The fact of the matter is for every UW student that goes to work for Bill, his/her education was in part subsidized by the government of Canada... Therefore, the Canadian taxpayer has been indirectly subsidizing Micro$oft for years, and it's about time Gates started anteing up for the cost of developing some of his future employees!
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
Look I've been on campus while this shit-storm has happened and there were two major camps of students.
1: Don't care...
2: No way that I'm going to sit here and not bitch.
My real point is there were very few supporters for this deal, the campus news papers have put negative spin on it, students that understood the deal tried to inform others and so on.
By most this was seen as a step for Microsoft to enter the very Unix domenated computer education cirriculam. Start with one-two courses... then is a 2-3 years own 'em all
I'm really glad that this deal began to show its cracks.
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After this 2-4 of coke, and the next 2-4 of coke I only have one 2-4 of coke left. Better buy more.
I'm glad to hear of a university expressing reservations of a deal with MS. Texas A&M (my beloved school) has just made a large (subscription based, I might add) licensing deal with MS for several pieces of software. Looks like Gates is trying to make our generation as dependant on his products as the previous one is.
Various Java courses are mandatory at my university. Our main *nix server is a SPARC running Solaris. There are Sun workstations peppered across campus. As such, I wouldn't be surprised if we have a deal with Sun.
The same is true for IBM. In my mandatory OOP&D course, we're forced to sign an agreement put forth by IBM. This allows for free educational use of Smalltalk.
I doubt it's a coincidence that we're taught UML (also mandatory), and find ourselves with a rather hefty donation (supposedly in the millions) from Rational.
I've also been through mandatory classes for C and C++.... although I doubt bribery is involved.
These are all classes I've taken. All mandatory at my school, and I'm only in second year. Who knows what the future holds?
So what was your point again?
Frankly, I don't find it hard to justify even the more underhanded deals considering the state of tuition fervor in Ontario universities. Thanks to deregulation, Computer Science and Computer Engineering students face unrestricted tuition increases in the near future, whereas various other science course, and the liberal arts, are provide some security. Over the past 10 years, tuition has supposedly increased by ~130%. If choosing a mandatory C# course over a mandatory Java course means saving the students money, I can't see why the option wouldn't be given strong consideration at the very least.
It seems that the president of UW didn't actually sign anything, despite all appearances to the contrary. viz:
;-)
"In retrospect, it was a mistake to announce agreement in principle with respect to the curriculum initiatives, a mistake for which I take the responsibility." (my emphasis)
You might call it "good news" although I think at best it's a Pyrrhic victory. The damage done to UW's reputation -- unnecessarily as it turns out -- is going to take more fixing than just another slashdot article. We got stomped on, and justifiably.
Fortunately the forum was streamed and recorded by the student government, the Feds, and you can listen to it by downloading the mp3 (29 MB). Although we might take down UW's internet connection
I'm hosting a group project to transcribe the recording. Please help! It contains the president's apology but also some interesting information about C# as well.
simon
UW CS Alum
simonwoodside.com
PS. The School of Computer Science rejected the deal before the original announcement. This is all concerned with Computer Engineering, not CS.
home page
Read the whole transcript before you judge.
Check out the comments of Dean Chaudhuri. I don't doubt that this decision will get the fifth degree.
Simon
home page
The most obvious one is the special-quoted strings with no escapes. Those were obviously put in there so that people would stop typing forward slashes into filenames. There is a huge contingent of people who think you have to #ifdef every filename to make code portable between Windows and Unix, and the more that people think this the better for MicroSoft, because it discourages people writing portable code. In fact all Windows calls take forward slashes and I strongly encourage anybody writing code for Windows to use forward slashes at every moment possible so that they have no temptation to break this.
This language was not designed as a "better Java". The people told to make it got a chance to put in their ideas for a "better Java" so there is some good stuff there. But they were also ordered to make this a lock-into-Windows language and this is scary.