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Stanford Offers Cocoa Class

Posted by pudge on from the mmmm-cocoa dept.

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?"

3 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. Strange by nepheles · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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))))
  2. Re:Why? by JoshWurzel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Theory Vs. Practice by FugiMax · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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. :)