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."

Comments

Re:Vanilla Lattee and Pepsi just brainwash you

[FishWithAHammer]

Some of these languages are just beyond concepts I can describe. C# has to be the worst lanugage ever. Delegates, Properites.

C# is an excellent language for what it's intended to do: relatively rapid application development and deployment. Anyone who claims that that's not a huge market is deluding themselves or is likely to rant about how "we don't need" that.

How freaking lame, and they are just copying Java. Much in the same respect that DirectX started copying OpenGL after 8.0. My oh my how
some of the 3D state techniques started looking the same.

Actually, C# is Visual Basic with a more C-like syntax. It's also a little more picky about certain behaviors. C# is a vast improvement on Java (no stupid demarcation between stack and heap types, no idiotic arbitrary rules such as "one public class per file", which should make you-the-C++-weenie quite happy, etc.); it's Java with most of the problems fixed.