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."
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.
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.
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.
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.