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Professors Slam Java As "Damaging" To Students

jfmiller call to our attention two professors emeritus of computer science at New York University who have penned an article titled Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow? in which they berate their university, and others, for not teaching solid languages like C, C++, Lisp, and ADA. The submitter wonders whether any CS students or professors would care to respond. Quoting the article: "The resulting set of skills [from today's educational practices] is insufficient for today's software industry (in particular for safety and security purposes) and, unfortunately, matches well what the outsourcing industry can offer. We are training easily replaceable professionals... Java programming courses did not prepare our students for the first course in systems, much less for more advanced ones. Students found it hard to write programs that did not have a graphic interface, had no feeling for the relationship between the source program and what the hardware would actually do, and (most damaging) did not understand the semantics of pointers at all, which made the use of C in systems programming very challenging."

8 of 1,267 comments (clear)

  1. tasty by User+956 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Professors Slam Java As "Damaging" To Students

    I dunno about you, but java was nothing but helpful to me as a student. the drinkable kind, at least.

    --
    The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
    1. Re:tasty by TurboTimmy · · Score: 3, Funny

      I don't know a lot about programming as a profession, but teh article feels on target to me. I don't know a lot about comedy, but this feels like a pointer joke to me.
    2. Re:tasty by computational+super · · Score: 4, Funny
      doing your homework in haskell or lisp or hell

      Hell? Maybe you meant Perl?

      --
      Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
  2. Re:CS Newbie here. by forgotten_my_nick · · Score: 4, Funny

    Sure don't you know that C++ was just a cruel joke by the creators. ;)

    http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Beowulf/c++_interview/c++_interview.html

  3. Re:University should be about people by Exitar · · Score: 5, Funny

    "I have to read *3* *books* *a* *week* on average. Not picture books either I assue you. It is a lot of work, but the upshot is improved grammer and spelling skills that are lacking in the technical."

    It does not work for you. In your post mispelled:
    narrowm, lets, aggreed, trun collage, auctually, focuesed, assue, grammer, socialolgy, beeing, couyld, cynsical

    Read more...

  4. Just as an extra anecdote by Moraelin · · Score: 4, Funny

    Just as an extra anecdote and illustration of what happens when such people finally get told about pointers (but still don't quite "get it"): one team's architect actually told everyone to use "Integer" instead of "int" in method definitions everywhere, because it's faster! See, it copies only a pointer instead of the whole int!

    Yeah, that guy was quite a bit less than a Michelangelo.

    --
    A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
  5. Re:University should be about people by Exitar · · Score: 4, Funny

    Ehm...
    .
    1. English is not my first language.
    2. I'm a techie...
    3. I read only books full of pictures!

  6. Don't forget about English by borat4president · · Score: 3, Funny

    And do you people know how damaging English can be to those studying linguistics? No cases, no genders, just two articles, only 26 letters, decimal numerals, vowels not ommitted from spelling, etc. etc.