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Stanford Offers Cocoa Class
An anonymous reader writes "Back in the early 90's Stanford University offered a class on Objective-C for students interested in writing applications for NeXTSTEP. After a long hiatus it appears that class will be offered again as CS193E, 'Object-oriented User Interface Programming.' It will be covering the Apple development tools, Objective-C, Foundation and AppKit, and Quartz. Any other schools out there planning or already offering Objective-C courses?"
It seems strange that Objective-C has failed to attract the popularity of C++, given that it seems (to me at least) by far the more elegant of the two. It implements object-oriented programming in a much cleaner way than C++, and still loses none of the power of C. What Java should have been, really
((lambda x ((x))) (lambda x ((x))))
Would it not be better to teach the students HOW to program well
There is. It's called the rest of the CS program at the school. They teach OOP-concepts, algorithms, etc.
This class is more specific. And optional. No one is forced to take it. And Cocoa isn't a language, its a set of API's. It just happens to use Objective-C. With macs being such a minority in schools, I don't see why its a problem to have an optional (probably student-run) class to each people how to develop for the mac.
Schools should focus on the principles of functional and object oriented languages instead of teaching specific languages.
If you are solid in the principles of programming, the choice of language shouldn't matter. They will never be able to teach you every language out there. I think it would be much better to have an intro to different languages instead. Perhaps they do; don't really know. I don't think that this is a wasted course or anything. Any additional experience is great. Is this meant as a introduction to GUIs? If that is the case, I'm all for it. Otherwise, I think there would be more benefitial courses in the long run.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
The only way I could practically learn Objective-C back in the mid-90s was to work @ NeXT, which I eventually did.
But how the hell it took this long to get it introduced into any University Curriculum is what truly has been pathetic.
If you can't introduce this technology to the future developers how do you expect to sell it, beyond the "ease of use" paradigm?
Hopefully Berkley will be next followed by the University of Washington until the entire Pac-10 offers classes.
Because it's optional and not part of the core curriculum, unlike what MS is pushing.
I'm of the opinion that language-specific classes are great to have at a college level. Not only can a student get a wide sampling of different languages, but I think it can also teach a lot in terms of language theory. (Common threads in languages, differences in languages, etc.) Also, these classes are almost ALWAYS electives. A CS major not wanting to touch a language-specific class doesn't have to -- it's there as a choice.
:)
I think a diverse choice of classes using different languages and actually going in-depth into a language itself can be helpful. I mean, there are a lot of optimizations in languages, C for example, that are done by taking advantage of the structure of the language itself -- which one can only discover after diving headfirst into a language. I wish someone would have pointed certain things out to me about C or Java that aren't immediately apparent.
Bottomline, we're not all out to get PhD's and become evolutionary CS people. Some people just want to learn a language or two, get really good at it, and get a job. Not everyone wants to write a thesis on Compiler Optimizations.
This is very encouraging. What is needed is support from educational institutions like this. Objective-C can cure the IT world of its C++ woes.