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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."
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.
"A Real Programmer Can Write in Any Language (C, Java, Lisp, Ada)"
that's true, but again soft engineering/programming is a subset of computer science (maybe, i suppose you could argue they aren't)
"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
- Edsger Dijkstra
Yeah, I just read a press release from the FAA blasting driver training courses. Apparently, flight students who just got their drivers licenses were not able to navigate in the air, execute banks, take-off, or land properly.
Students have to start somewhere. It's easier to start with simple stuff than to try to cram their heads full of everything all at once.
If they teach you only one programming language, yes, they damage you.
In the course of my CS education (early 90s), they started with Pascal when they explained algorithmical basics.
Later courses were in C for OS and networking, while other courses used about everything from PROLOG to ADA.
You learn that some paradigms map to certain types of problems better (or worse) than others. So don't open sockets in
Prolog (I have seen'em do it man) , and don't do AI in C.
a quote: "if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail".
Edmond Schonberg, Ph.D., is vice-president of AdaCore and a professor emeritus of computer science at New York University. He has been involved in the implementation of Ada since 1981. With Robert Dewar and other collaborators, he created the first validated implementation of Ada83, the first prototype compiler for Ada9X, and the first full implementation of Ada2005. Maybe Ada is helpful for learning concurrent programming and safe typing, but I'll wait for the opinion of a slightly less partial party.
There going to plenty of flames on this topic.
As someone who programs mainly in java, I have to say they have a point. Surely a degree in CS should get someone familiar with all forms of higher order programing (both OO and functional). They should also have a reasonably solid understanding of basic hardware architecture and how that affects programs.
Unfortunately this does not seem to be the case at least in NZ. Some don't even know about basic complexity ideas and often have little to zero mathematics under there belt.
I did not do CS but physics. I was required to do Assembly,basic,C,matlab,R,Lisp,Java,C++,Haskell and a bunch of others I don't care to mention (Like PLC's and FPGA stuff).
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
This might be obvious, but take a close look at the authors of the article:
Dr. Robert B.K. Dewar, AdaCore Inc. (President)
Dr. Edmond Schonberg, AdaCore Inc. (Vice President).
The article by some weird coincidence slams Java and praises Ada.
Salt, please...
PS, Ada is mainly alive in the Military/Aerospace industries where projects can last 20+ years.
In a College for a 2-yr Programming Diploma, this would be fine because the goal of such a program is just writing some business application or some such. Nothing that requires any real competence.
On the other hand, Universities have a much different end goal. They want to teach such that completing there program means that the student can go onto a Masters program, etc. Obviously, Java won't get students there without a massive amount of pain if they go on to further study.
Well, at least that how it was, and how it should be. Currently, Universities are edging toward the College level. What this has produced is a massive gap in knowledge/skill of where the student is expected to be and where they actually are upon entering a Graduate program.
Unfortunately, this isn't just in CS. More and more I see Mathematics and Physics programs degrading as well. From what I've seen, this is due to Administration applying... pressure for high grades, etc. No grades, no funding. The cycle continues.
Though, I must point out that there are some Departments that are making an attempt at fighting back. Small in number they may be, there is still hope for a return to actual academics. Though, we'll see how that plays out. You never know, I wouldn't put it beyond a spiteful Administration to turn a Department into offering just service courses.
Where I go to school, just this year we switched from teaching the introductory classes in Java to a combination of Python, then C, then Java. I think that this is much better than using any particular one of those languages the whole time. It gives the student experience with more different concepts and from that I think they can begin to see how everything works together. Also, starting with something simpler than Java/Eclipse seems to make it a lot easier the first few weeks of the course.
One thing I have noticed though, is a complete lack of security related training. Something about calling eval() on every input just to parse integers makes me cringe. I guess the idea is that worrying to much standard practices keeps people from thinking creatively or something. Unfortunately, it also seems like a good way to get into a lot of bad habits.
I would suggest being taught a programming language such as D, at least in addition. Although the transition from C/C++ to D can be painful, D contains many similarities with C/C++ such as speed, except it's much tidier and has many of the advantages of Java syntax whilst maintaining the power of C/C++ if necessary (optional pointers, optional manual garbage collection etc.).
Sooner or later, languages are going to evolve, and surely it's only a matter of time before something D-like is going to be used anyway. Might as well make the switch sooner rather than later.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
.fuck you collage idiots Well, the problem is that you want to a collage. That's a bunch of stuff pasted together by art majors. If you had gone to a college, or perhaps a university, you would have learned stuff beyond programming such as data structures, compiler theory, etc. Programming, especially in any particular language, is a skill, like plumbing or electrical wiring. Knowing the theory behind it is education. I was a decent programmer when I started college. All the theory and stuff that I learned in college didn't seem that useful at the time but as I've gone along in my career it's definitely the difference between being a code monkey and being someone who can design systems.OK, this hit one of my hot buttons. Before I continue, though, let me preface my statement by saying that I don't disagree with the article (which is right on the button). But I disagree with the way the summary characterizes the situation.
I totally agree that universities shouldn't be teaching Java exclusively. They need to teach the basics of modular, functional, declarative and oo languages. Why? Certainly *not* to fill "software engineering" positions!!! A university's role is to do research, not to act as some technical college. OK, I can see having a programming course aimed at creating programmers for industry if it's going to pay the bills at the uni. But *don't* make that your "Computer Science" course!!
Computer Science should be science (well, math anyway). Universities should be getting the 5 or 10 graduates they need that will move on to academia (or industry research) later in their careers. Because right now, *nobody* is getting taught Computer Science! Lately I've been reading papers posted on http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ Regularly I have to go back to the basics and learn extremely fundamental theory because nobody *ever* taught them to me in the first place. Half the time I think, "OMG, I never even knew this existed -- and it was done in 1969!!????"
More and more lately, I've been wanting to phone my University up and ask for my tuition back.
If you want to learn how to program in a professional setting, there's nothing better to do than just start writing code. Get your chops up. Then find some big free software projects and start fixing bugs. Learn how to use the tools (configuration management, etc). Learn how to interact with the other programmers. That's all you really need (well, that and a quick automata and grammar course so that I don't have to look at yet another context free grammar being "parsed" by regular expressions).
But right now, where do you go if you want to actually learn theory? I guess the library... And getting back to the point, this is essentially what the paper is suggesting. Students need to learn all these things because they are relevant to the field. A university supports industry by doing basic research. If you don't understand the concepts that they point out, you just can't do that. Paraphrasing from the article, having a university course that's meant to pad out a student's resume is shoddy indeed.
I am a headhunter for high end roles at investment banks, and we are close to classifying CompSci as a "non degree", along with media studies, languages, etc.
Java is fine for teaching design patterns, and classical algorithms like Quicksort, or binary search.
But you can't do operating systems, and the success of Java in isolating you from any notion of the hardware is actually the problem.
We have already blacklisted courses like the one at Kings College, because they teach operating systems in Java.
Yes, really.
Their reason apparently is that it is "easier".
I have zero interest in kids who have studied "easy" subjects.
The world is a bigger, more competitive place, how many jobs do you think there are for people who have an easy time at college ?
Java is part of the dumbing down of CS.
A computer "expert" is not someone who knows template metaprogramming in C++, or compiler archaeology in BCPL, or the vagaries of the Windows scheduler.
It is someone who understands computers at multiple levels, allowing them to choose which one illuminates the problem at hand.
To be wise in computers you choose whether to think of something as a block of bytes, quadwords, a bitmap, a picture, or a buffer overflow pretending to be porn. If also have the option of understanding flash vs static RAM, virtual memory, or networked storage, all the better. I doubt if even 1% of CS grads could write code to turn this BMP into a JPG, or even explain the ideas behind this. In my experience, 50% could not work out how to develop a data structure for a bitmap that used palettes.
I have interviewed CS grads with apparently good grades who could not explain any data structure beyond arrays.
Any CS grad who sends us their CV with bullshit like "computers and society" or "web design" has their CV consigned to trash with no further reading.
A CS should be able to write a web server, not be an arts graduate who didn't get laid.
C++ makes you think at multiple levels, unlike Java, you simply cannot avoid thinking about your system from patterns to bytes. This may be good or bad for productivity, and I'm sure we risk a flame war here.
But I am entirely convinced you need to hack your way through a "real" system.
How can someone understand the Linux kernel without C & C++ ?
Is someone really fit to be called a computer scientist if like >50% of the Computer "Scientists" we interview for very highly paid jobs, show actual fear of working at that level.
They have the same "way above my head" attitude that a mediocre biologist might have to applying quantum theory to skin disease.
Partly, as in the Kings College debacle it is lazy mediocre lecturers, but also CompSci grads frankly are not that smart, so they need their hands held.
Although the seats get filled, they quality is in monotonic decline.
Dominic Connor,Quant Headhunter
I'm kind of a proponent of having a student's evolution mirror the industry's, to an extent. Start them with C and then gradually introduce problems that were more and more difficult to solve in C. That way, when you show them C++ or Java, they can appreciate why these languages were needed and what classes of problems they're appropriate for and more importantly, what they're not appropriate for. But to really appreciate these things, you have to have students implement their own little OO runtime in C or whatever other procedural language. You can bet that after that, by the time you show them a true OO language, they'll know plenty about OOP, and things will just come more naturally.
These students are being trained as engineers. They shouldn't be afraid of a little grease.
I love Java, and I find it much more pleasant to use than C/C++, but I generally agree with TFA. I have seen many people doing things like this
which creates 10K temporary objects to construct a single string*. This is because they started learning programming with a high abstraction level so they have no idea of what is going on behind the scenes. It's something similar to starting programming with one of these new "intelligent" IDE's such as Eclipse, which do lots of things for you so you don't have to figure them out for yourself. I think all these abstractions are great for people who already know how to program, not for beginners. You wouldn't give a calculator to 6 year old kids learning math, would you?
I personally would being with C and then jump to Java. C is not so complicated as a first language if you don't introduce all its features from day one. It was my first language and I think it was a good choice, it shows you enough low-level concepts to be able to make efficient optimised code in higher-level languages. Besides, when you later jump to a more high-level OO language you appreciate the difference and learn it with interest.
* I know modern compilers are able to optimise that automatically using a StringBuffer or StringBuilder. I just chose that (somewhat unrealistic) example for the sake of simplicity, but the same happens in other cases that aren't so easily handled by the compiler.
I'll answer as a computer scientist.
I view school as bootstrapping a person to learn how to learn, and for teaching them the things that are timeless. The only reason that a popular programming language like Java is used in the first place is because something has to be used, so it may as well be that. However, many schools offer Scheme, ML, or Common Lisp as the programming language of choice when the job market is comparatively low. This is because it's seen to help the learning process. The goal isn't a marketable skill, but a vehicle to teach the timeless things like algorithms, data structures, and all those courses that have he word "theory" tacked on to the end of the titles.
If you want someone to be a lackey and build you a GUI, you'd be better off looking for someone who has an ITT certificate. If you're looking for something more on the math side of computing (again, algorithms, analysis), then you talk to a computer scientist.
Are you suggesting that the CS curriculum should be designed around solving your little practical problems?
I'm a Mechanical Engineer as well. Are you suggesting that _we_ should have spent our degrees studying look-up charts for HVAC ducts, or how to make nice Excel graphs? (calculus, mechanics, thermodynamics, heat transfer, ring any bells?)
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
try {
int fds[2] = new int[2];
pipe(fd);
} catch (memoryAllocationErrorOrSo) {
}
Why does this need to be so complicated [...] It doesn't. You've made it more complicated than it needs to be, by putting in an exception handler. What are you going to do in the unlikely event that there is an exception, anyway - fix it somehow? Free up another 8 bytes of memory to make room? Just remove that try statement, and let the exception be caught by your top level handler. And then there is this garbage collector that professors swarm about. Does it handle circles? Yes, it does. It's not a reference counter, it's a garbage collector. It collects garbage, i.e. any heap object that can't be reached by following a chain of references from a root reference (like a local variable, a static field, or an instance field of any non-garbage object). A modern GC won't be fooled by two garbage objects holding references to each other.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Many universities are simply training highly replaceable professionals, which is a big reason why outsourcing is such a problem. When two people--one in the USA, one in India, for example--have the same skills, the cheaper will be chosen (and rightly so, sorry). The point of the article is that many universities are simply training programming rather than teaching computer scientists. It's an important distinction, which some people just don't understand.
-William Brendel
The better CS undergrad programs don't really teach languages per se. The main focus of the curriculum should be the theoretical underpinnings of computer science, combined with the practical aspects of software development. Since languages themselves are part of the practical aspect of software development, in addition to also being the focus of some computer science theory, it is unavoidable that languages should themselves be studied to some degree, and also used to a large degree to practice the theory that is being taught. Most theoretical CS only really needs 'pseudocode' to illustrate the concepts being discussed. But since students are often asked to write programs to demonstrate their understanding of the subject matter, a real language is unavoidable. But the language itself is secondary to the real meat of the subject, which should all be mathematical and theoretical in nature.
At CMU the very first CS class (that losers like me who didn't AP out of the first CS course, mostly because my high school didn't even have computer classes let alone AP computer classes!) really did focus on teaching a language - Pascal - and a significant part of the class was the learning of the language. It was the least useful CS class I took in the long run (not surprising, as an introductory course in any subject is likely to be the same). Subsequent courses would spend 1 - 2 weeks going over the fundamentals of the language to be used in coursework for the remainder of the class (which in some classes was C, in some was C++, some used ML, others Scheme, etc), to get everyone started, and after that, you had to figure it out on your own in conjunction with actually learning the theory that was being taught. It really isn't that hard to pick up a new language once you know a couple, although I did have a hard time with ML, mostly because I was completely unmotivated to learn it, feeling that it was absolutely useless to know (I was right).
No really good CS program has any classes with names like "Java 101" or "Advanced C++". To use a carpentry analogy, I would expect a really good carpentry school to teach the fundamental rules and "theory" of carpentry, so that the student upon graduation really understood what carpentry was all about and could apply their knowledge to aspects of the subject that they hadn't even encountered in school. I wouldn't expect a good carpentry school to have classes like "Advanced Hammering" and "Bandsaw 101". The courses would instead be "Introduction to House Frames" and "How to Construct Joints". You'd be expected to learn the use of the tools in the natural course of studying these subjects.
It's the same for CS. Good programs don't teach the tools, they teach the *subject*; learning the tools is intrinsic in the study of the theory.
"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...
I you make everyone special, nobody is really special.
Every time someone tells me that there are no pointers in Java I laugh a little. EVERYTHING in java that isn't a scalar is actually referenced through pointers. That is, you declare the pointer variable and then "new" the object into place.
They are just incredibly _boring_ pointers. You cannot math on them. There is no sense of location to those pointers. But the absence of interesting pointer operations, and the absence of the _semantic_ _copy_ operation is what all this alleged pointerlessness is all about.
I have only two _Real_ problems with java... (okay three if you count the complete requirement that you constantly have to deal with exceptions even when you know they cannot really happen, and if they did, you would want the thing to abort all over the place... but I digress)
(1) Java has no useful destructors because no object has predictable scope. If you think finalize methods are the same as destructors then don't bother responding, you don't know what destructors are...
(2) Since everything is a pointer in Java, you have to bend over backwards to pass-by-value. The fact that the language doesn't even begin to provide copy-construction semantics. What a miserable PITA.
Now the _dumbest_ thing about java is that they were so set against multiple inheritance that they never bothered to ask themselves why _every_ OO language starts out life without multiple inheritance only to have to add it later. By making everything a proper linear subclass of Object, they left themselves with having to graft on "interfaces" which is just multiple inheritance with the "bonus" of completely preventing default implementations. (Which lead to delegation etc.)
The way the language keeps sprouting things it claims to never have and never need, well it's very like watching a clown car endlessly explode with ridiculous archetypes. After a while it just isn't funny any more.
So yea, teaching people Java as an introductory language is something of a disservice if you ever want to make them truly think about programming and what makes some things machine smart, while others are machine stupid.
--- BUT ---
I worked in education for years. The fundamental problem with computer science education is that it is being taught by computer scientists instead of educators. We are stuck learning from the people who learned from the people who made it up. None of these people ever learned to EFFECTIVELY IMPART INFORMATION.
Consequently, the students are largely unemployable on the day of graduation.
The classic computer curricula seems to consist of throwing three or four languages at a kid in the hopes that they will "just kind of figure out this programming stuff."
The field of computer science has not yet come up with a "basic theory"... a starting place... The list of things a student simply must know before you start filling their head with syntax.
And so we are a bunch of prelates training our acolytes in our special, individualized deeper mysteries.
And that's what everybody is doing worldwide, so our graduates are just as lame as everyone else's...
Cue "Enter the Gladiators"...
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
People learn a lot through failure and pain. C is clearly the perfect choice when you look at it this way.
99% of what you learn as a programmer you don't learn at college anyways (at least the people who don't totally suck at programming). Furthermore, unless you have one-on-one mentoring from a senior programmer or professor who has at least 10 years of solid professional coding experience under their belt, not much else is going to help you other than you and yourself in maturing as a programmer.
Most CompSci college graduates are totally unproductive on their first job. They can be put to work on trivial things, but no matter what school they came from, they are just going to need a lot of hand-holding to make it through the first year. That is just how it is. Doing coursework at school is no substitute for coding on a meaningful project, whether it be work related, something open-source related, or just something for fun. That is the honest to god's truth as a software developer for over 12 years now and I don't even consider myself even that wisened in the field (maybe after 20 years I will feel differently).
Now, with respect to Java as an introductory programming language, it is not bad but not great either, however the purpose of any introductory course to anything should be to capture the interest of the people who are curious enough to take the course in the first place. Back in college, we started with C (most of my peers had already been programming since they were teething but this was CMU) and if not for my persistent no quit attitude in life, I probably would of given up programming right then and there because spending your entire night trying to debug a trivial program not because you didn't understand the material but because of one stupid uninitialized pointer turns a lot of people off right then and there who may have had the potential to be great programmers, but because their first impression of programming was so bad, they gave it up before they got to learn more about how great programming really is.
Oh yeah, and the not relevant at all math courses didn't really help much either. Whenever in your career you need to use some advanced calculus or discrete math, you will have likely forgotten about 99% of it and need to look it all up in a book anyways. Besides, 99% of programming projects in the real world basically involve high school level algebra and not much else. What separates the productive programmers from the unproductive ones is not who got a better grade on their math course back in college, but those who innately understand systems and are willing to make the extra effort to learn all about the gazillion design patterns available to programmers so that when they are faced with a difficult project, they will not waste inordinate amounts of time reinventing the wheel.
As for understanding computing at a rather low-level, as is the case with a class in operating systems, then yah Java might not be such a great choice, but then again learning C is easy because C is made up of very simple constructs (C++ is another story). However, using C productively just requires a crapload of practice/experience to be good with, not necessarily a whole lot of computing expertise. In addition, the mastery of whatever API's you happen to be basing your career on is paramount as well. In the real world, employers don't want to hear "but I can learn anything quickly" because mastering some API's can take 6 months or more so if you come out of university with no specific skill sets, it is going to be really hard to get that first job because unless you can be productive soon (or even on day one), you are useless as far as employers are concerned. Also, though I don't program in Win32 professionally myself, from my understanding it takes at least 3 years of non-stop work with those API's just to be semi-proficient in them. Professionally, most of my work over the years has been in Java, and Java is probably scary to a lot of neophyte programmers these days because since 1.5, it has unfortunately turned into the bastard child of complexity like its twisted sister C++.
Last but not
I am not especially fond of Java myself. In fact, my focus has been precisely with lower level languages like the ones mentioned in the summary. I would love to work with these languages, preferably with tasks that where algorithmically and mathematically challenging etc.
.NET or Java jobs. The summary makes it sound like there is a great demand for my skills, but where are the jobs? /David
But I have not been able to find any such jobs. Job databases show 90%
Professors who care about students's education teach Lisp and Scheme. I had a professor who taught us Scheme in his free unpaid time after the main lecture. The university did not include it into the curriculum, but he explained to us why Scheme is important, and those of us who understood its importance choose to stay and listen to his unpaid unofficial lectures on Scheme. The reason these languages are important is in the mathematical thought that lies behind their structure. Every language has a way of thinking behind it. Some languages are procedural, others are functional. It is these paradigms that are important in a curriculum, because most mediocre programmers who get to program using one paradigm usually stay with it for a lifetime and never get to learn another. So a university should ideally offer courses on all available paradigms to make sure future programmers can choose the one which is the most productive for every specific project.
Yes, abstraction is key to tackling complexity. But equally, having no clue what happens behind that pretty Java code is the key to writing bad code and spending time debugging what you shouldn't even worry about.
Guess what? Even in Java, pointers still come to bite you in the arse when you least expect them. I see people every day who have trouble understanding the difference between "==" and "equals()" in Java, because they never learned the pointers behind them. They're essentially one abstraction level too far from understanding what their own code is doing.
Or even in Java learning why you can't modify an "int" parameter, but you can modify the contents of an "int[]" parameter, guess what? Requires pointers. People end up doing all sorts of unnatural metal contortions to remember when passing by value isn't really passing by value, when "it's a pointer" would sum it up perfectly.
And it shows. I've had people come to me half a dozen times with basically the same idiotic "auugh! Java's Hashtable is broken! I added a new value, and when I look into its array with a debugger it replaced my old one!" When in fact, it was only added a node to the front of the linked list. But they don't know what a linked list is, nor what a hash table really is, nor how a Node can contain another Node, without a concept of pointers. Worse yet, not only I see them spending a week debugging Hashtable, I see piss-poor workarounds done to prevent it from doing its job.
Or I see burger-flippers-turned-programmers occasionally get the real programmers fired for doing the right thing. Like using a "==" where it's correct to use it. But the burger flipper doesn't understand that. He learned some "for String use equals()" mantra, and he'll apply it and preach it, cargo-cult style, without even understanding what he's _doing_.
Or I see people think that optimization means replacing two lines with a one line call, because they have no fucking clue what the machine does with that code. They think that speed is measured in lines of code, because noone explained to them otherwise. So they wonder why their replacing two ifs with a catch is actually slower. (And I'm not getting into the many ways such a catch can make the code less secure, for example, by assuming that a real exception is just their loop reaching the end of the array.) Exactly what throwing an exception does, is a mystery to them.
Etc.
No, noone said you must keep programming in "a language where even K&R wrote unsafe code, nor that difficulty equals worthiness. But it helps to be at least exposed to those concepts once, even if thereafter you go on to program in Java or VB for the rest of your days. The fact that you worked with pointers once in C and managed to get them right, _will_ show in your Java code too.
Probably the best thing that helped my coding was doing assembly on my parents' old home computer, back in high school. In fact, in hex, because that ZX-81 with 1k RAM didn't even have enough RAM for an assembler. Wrap your mind around _that_, if you think C is too hard.
Would I advise anyone to write a production program in assembly nowadays? Nope, God forbid. I wouldn't have advised writing a whole program in assembly even back then. But understanding the machine behind that high level stuff will show even in your Java code.
And, yes, not every architect needs to be a Michelangelo. But it helps if they're not a clueless moron who can't even build a doghouse right. You can see plenty of architects nowadays who can't even get a basic house right. They know how to draw an artsy sketch of a house, but they have no clue how to calculate it to actually stand upright or what materials to use so it doesn't get damaged by rain within a year or two. And/or need a civil engineer to fix their elementary mistakes. Maybe it wouldn't hurt that much if they knew a bit more, ya know?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
Java is one more step in evolution which normally the professors hate because it moves them away from the machine. But mankind has more important things to do (watching LOST and Sopranos) than twiddling with RPG.
Wrong. Java is a step *back*. Not because of the abstraction, mind you, but simply because Java is such a severely limited language. 30-40 years ago amazing new things were developed in CS, none of these are included in Java. Lambda? Map-Reduce? Purely functional code? Caml-style pattern matching? Conditions? People say Java made C++ obsolete, which is completely wrong, since C++ is far more powerful than Java (thanks to generic programming and metaprogramming). Just have a look at Boost, or C++0x, and try to replicate the features in Java - WITHOUT runtime overhead (this is one key feature of generic/meta programming - a lot of computation can be done at *compile*-time).
Actually, the next step in evolution should be Lisp, since it is one of the the most powerful and flexible languages in existence. There is nothing in the language that intrinsically prohibits Lisp performing as well as C++, its mostly the tools that lack development (for comparison, g++ has had a hell of a lot of improvements; the 2.x series was awful). If you avoid certain things like eval, Lisp code can be optimized well enough. There is a Scheme compiler called Stalin which does just that, and it can even outperform comparable C code.
So, if you want to abstract away from the machine, why use Java instead of Lisp?
IMO there are other reasons for Java:
1) its a braindead easy language.
2) you only need mediocre programmers, since Java is easy enough for them, and there are much more mediocre programmers than good ones.
3) as a consequence, programmers are expendable, jobs can be outsourced etc. One C++/Lisp/Haskell expert could replace an entire Java team. Not good for the company, since this guy becomes indispensable, and can demand more salary etc.
4) Universities can claim to have more success in teaching, since the number of guys with a CS degree is higher.
5) Companies need less teaching courses, because of (1).
6) Java has been overhyped for a while now, and many CTOs are so clueless, they just buy into it.
Well, you can disagree at my opinion about Java, but it is a fact that CS students *should* learn about the functional paradigm, what lambdas are, closures, and so on as well as what pointers are, how the memory works, what the garbage collector actually does etc. However, this is not the case - and THIS is a serious problem.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
As a CS Professor, here are some of my thoughts on this article:
(1) Java is what the market wants. Yes, we can teach any other language under the sun. But the reality is, that the software industry values individuals who are Java-literate. By this I mean an individual who has a basic understanding of the OO principles that the language is founded upon, can write Java code using common tools, and has at least some insight into some of the more common Java APIs. Any learning institution that doesn't take this into account when designing their curriculum is doing a serious disservice to their student body. While some do go to University for the sheer joy of learning a subject - most are there to ultimately get a job.
(2) In my opinion there is something seriously wrong with a Java course that emphasizes Swing or Web development, rather than the fundamentals. Yes, its important to get things in and out of a program, but, at least initially these should be incidental to the main event. Learning the language, and applying it effectively. Thinking in an object-oriented way, which many of you know is not necessarily an intuitive way to look at the world - especially if you already have a procedural background. GUI and web application development should be separate, advanced courses.
(3) I sometimes lament the lack of insight into pointers, but any professor worth their salary will spend some time discussing the Java object reference architecture, and relate that to pointer-based languages. Regardless of how abstract your language is "opening up the hood" and demonstrating how things work, and why things have been designed the way they are, is often worth knowing.
(4) I laughed when I read the article about Praxis, especially the part about formal methods. Are they serious? Yes I was taught formal methods in school, and could understand *why* I'd want to use them... If I had all the time in the world... a huge budget to burn and customers not screaming for something that the business needed yesterday. Praxis offers software development based on formal methods and as a consequence occupies an important (and probably expensive) specialized niche of the software ecosystem. To suggest that this approach should be the norm and lament its absence really betrays that the authors have spent too much time in academia and not enough in the real world.
(5) Ada is a great language - in fact I learned Ada 83 as a first language along with C. It just isn't relevant to most software development companies or IT departments - if indeed it ever was. I worked on a research project that was part of the Ada 9X Real-Time initiative - the main users were aerospace and military vendors - particularly embedded systems. There you do need to know about concurrency and distribution - along with hard performance deadlines and often a slew of safety and mission-critical issues you need to consider to do a good job. However, I fail to see the general relevance of Ada to a commercial market that is primarily interested in "simple" information systems, getting information out of a database and/or putting it in - with some processing on route. Why should I use Ada when the market in general doesn't use it?
(6) We teach concurrency - its useful stuff to know. I think that using formalisms to describe concurrent programs is going a wee bit too far (see (4)) above.
Well, the whole point is that this exception should not be necessary at all. Just have 2 ints on the stack...
Of course, because while it's possible to run out of of heap space (implying a possible OutOfMemoryError), computers have had infinite stacks since the 1960s. Simply by moving the memory over to the stack, you can't possibly run out anymore! It's brilliant!
Hint: it's all the same memory. Your desperate desire to have the bytes come out of the "stack" bucket instead of the "heap" bucket is simply irrational.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
University is not where you go to learn a specific set of skills. If you want that, you go to a technical trade school.
University is where you go to get an in-depth set of concepts, critical thinking skills, research skills, and theory foundations. This is true for any major you wish to approach. In the CS department, there is a reason you take different languages, some are for system development, some are for app development, some are for theory exploration with little to no value outside of the educational environment. Java falls into one of those categories. Assembly, C, C++ fall into others. Ada falls into yet another.
Think of it in the terms of the English major, you know, those dime-a-dozen students who will end up working at Burger King and Mr. Chows Empire Chinese Buffet, or they go to Hollywood to work as waitresses while they wait for their big break. The English major takes a load of literature, English, American, Russian, Manga, and poetry from Bacon/Shakespeare to Ginsberg to Hughes to Tupac, and writing from haiku to freestyle with a goofy footed pentameter (trademark and patent pending). None of this is particularly helpful to someone who wants to come out of school with business writing skills.
Remember, in University, some of the most mistaken ideas come from the professors.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Ehm...
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1. English is not my first language.
2. I'm a techie...
3. I read only books full of pictures!
First, some of the best comments in this thread: Comment 1 Comment 2 Comment 3 Comment 4 Comment 5 Comment 6
I list them because they hold a lot of wisdom, and wanted to draw special attention to them for such as well.
When I was in college I got really ticked at the level of theory - there was too much of it. It wasn't balanced well enough with implementation; and as I looked around, I noticed that was pretty common place among academic institutions (colleges AND universities - and I'm not talking about trade schools either). That was before they moved their curriculum to using Java for the first couple classes; and after they did, I had already heard some stories about the upper classes getting some of these "new" students and not being able to focus on the class materials because they had to teach these students C/C++ first and the students had a harder time getting it. (Not so the other way around.)
That said, I've started thinking about how I would put together a curriculum for teaching computer programming/science/engineering. (I'm not talking about computer _hardware_ engineering, btw.) I even did some tutoring after college. So what would I do?
I'd start students with a language that can be used to teach the real basic skills and concepts (variables, functions, etc.) - even vbscript could be used at this level; but I'd also quickly move them on to more advanced concepts (in the case of vbscript, it would only be used for a couple weeks at most), moving from language to language to bring not only a depth of concepts and understanding, but also a breadth of computer languages and kinds of tasks. I'd also ensure that somewhere in the curriculum students would be exposed to Assembly, and have found that even a small exposure makes a big difference in programming styles and philosophies for programmers.
Furthermore, I'd break the curriculum into two parts. One part would start from the ground up; and the other would start from the top down. Both would be required of students. The idea being one part would be more focused on the theoretical, while the other would be more focused on the substantial - implementation. Both would work together to produce a well-rounded student. Additionally, it would be designed such that students that wanted to work on operating systems would simply follow the one from start to end; while other students would be able to leave for more focused courses at the layer of their choice. (Students wanting OS would still have other courses for focus work too, btw.) The primary idea being that even a web-app developer needs to know the underlying systems, and even the OS developer needs to understand the abstractions of the web-app developer.
I'd also have the overall curriculum be far more software engineering focused. Yes, if people want to really be computer "scientists", then they could do that; but industry really needs software engineers, not computer scientists. Real programs require engineers, and sadly, this is strongly lacking from most all academic computer programs. (Some have changed it, but not many.)
I'd also think that this approach would be very favorable to the authors of TFA and the comments I've linked. The ideas probably need a bit more refinement, but the general approach would be sound - and it's not what academia is doing today by any stretch of the imagination.
FWIW - While I am relatively young (college grad of 2003), my main strength is C prog
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
1. Mathematics requirements in CS programs are shrinking.
The reason is because Computer Science has developed into a discipline that is no longer pure mathematics. There's only so many courses you can squeeze into four years.
2. The development of programming skills in several languages is giving way to cookbook approaches using large libraries and special-purpose packages.
Guess what, that's what building real software is like today. We don't need people that can write quicksort in obscure unused languages but people that can grasp systems of millions of lines of code. Ada doesn't prepare you for that because it is a toy language that never really was adopted outside of the academic world. It has no good, widely used frameworks & libraries like you find in the real world. People don't use it for a whole range of software systems that you find in the real world and to prepare you for this real world there are simply much better languages around these days.
3. The resulting set of skills 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.
I agree that skills are important. A good prof can teach those using pretty much any turing complete language if it needs to be done. Java isn't half bad for teaching a whole lot of important CS concepts and theory. And unlike Ada, people actually use it. As for C and C++ they are useful languages to learn of course. Many colleges still do.
But of course two ex profs working for adacore are hardly objective. Ada is as dead as latin. It has some nice features but nothing you won't find somewhere else. Keeping professional skills up to date is as important for professors as it is for students. Having done a Ph. D. in software engineering & architecture and having practiced my skills in several companies, my view is that one of the largest problems in computer science education is teachers who have never worked on real, industrial sized software systems and continue to send students into industry with a lot of misguided & naive ideas about how to build software. Most SE teachers out there simply have no clue what they are talking about. Software engineering is a skill learned in practice because the teachers in university mostly lack the skills required to properly prepare students. That's the sad reality.
Jilles
But, the whole reason to GO to a University, is to get the skills/education to make more money when finished, than you would have if you had not gone.
That's not why I went to college. That's why you go to a trade school.
I went to college as a CS major because I loved programming. I went to college because I enjoyed learning, and wanted to round out my education in a lot of ways.
That I happened to be able to get a job after was because I was able to take all of the very abstract concepts I had learned and apply them to practical matters. But I had always been doing that on my own all through school anyway - why would I need school for that? Anyone can do that on their own, schools are there to teach you things that are hard to grasp or learn on your own.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Java is all about pointers actually. Everything that is not an atomic type (int/long) is actually a pointer. They even call that a reference! Hah, people go use C++ for a while.
And because it's like that, you have heap allocations for every non-atomic data type, which is really the opposite of performance.
Not really, no. The just-in-time compiler performs pointer escape analysis for the allocated objects and only uses the heap for the ones where heap allocation is actually necessary; the rest use the stack regardless of how the programmer wrote the declaration.
Admittedly, it's taken a while for this optimisation to be included, but it is there in the latest versions of Java.
You may not find some languages (Scheme, Haskell) practical, or useful for getting a job; however, they help you understand certain concepts a lot better. If you really learn Scheme, you'll understand recursion, and will also get an appreciation for syntax (since scheme has none :); Haskell will teach you typing (templates etc) and lazy evaluation. Of course, you *could* learn those things in C++ or Java, but the concepts will be every unnatural, so chances are you won't really grok them. After you've learned the concepts, then it is relatively easy to apply them in a different language.
So, what, you're going to hire math geeks only? People with degrees in mathematics or operations research, or perhaps some of the hard sciences? In my own experience, while there are some non-CS degrees that are excellent preparation for a CS career, only a CS degree is a CS degree. It is lamentable that some schools have embraced the trade-school mentality, but many more have not. When I was teaching courses as a graduate student (just a couple of years ago), the curriculum began with Java and quickly shifted to Haskell. A neighboring institution still uses Ada as an undergraduate language. There's also a legion of Knights of the Lambda Calculus who are trying to get Scheme reintroduced to the undergraduate curricula in several institutions in the area. Intellectual diversity about languages is alive and well in the academy, based on the institutions I've seen up close and personal.
Also, who is this "we"? You and someone else who shares your prejudices? Or is this you and the senior engineering staff? If you're about to decree CS as a non degree, maybe you should get the input of the people who will be most brutally affected by your shortsightedness.
So glad to know that you think design patterns and classic algorithms are worth studying.
Look, pick up a copy of Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Stein's Algorithms textbook sometime. That's the definitive work on algorithms--if you need an algorithm, it's probably sitting in CLRS somewhere, along with some beautiful mathematical exposition about it. Every algorithm listed in the book can be trivially converted into Java. So why the hate for teaching CS with Java? It's a perfectly sensible language for many very important parts of CS.
Further, I've taught operating system design in Python. Yes, Python. When talking about how a translation lookaside buffer works, I don't write C code on the board. I write pseudocode in Python and say "so, this is how it looks from twenty thousand feet." On those rare occasions when we have to get down and dirty with the bare metal, then it's time to break out C--and we leave C behind as soon as possible. I want students to be focused on the ideas of translation lookaside buffers, not the arcane minutiae of implementations.
After all. Implementing it is their homework, and it involves hacking up the Minix code. In C.
If it was an easy subject, would changes need to be made to make it easier?
If it was a spectacularly hard subject with a 50% washout rate, would changes need to be made to make it easier?
I've been in courses where 50% of the class washed. They were horrible, horrible classes. The pedagogy needed to change. The learning curve needed to be smoothed out and made gentler. This is in no way equivalent to saying it was made easy. The fact you think otherwise brands you as an intellectual elitist who can't be bothered to think logically about his own prejudices.
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.