Exam Board Deletes C and PHP From CompSci A-Levels

VitaminB52 writes "A-level computer science students will no longer be taught C, C#, or PHP from next year following a decision to withdraw the languages by the largest UK exam board. Schools teaching the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance's (AQA) COMP1 syllabus have been asked to use one of its other approved languages — Java, Pascal/Delphi, Python 2.6, Python 3.1, Visual Basic 6, and VB.Net 2008. Pascal/Delphi is 'highly recommended' by the exam board because it is stable and was designed to teach programming and problem-solving."

Comments

The lowest common denominator

[mrsam]

Gee, what do these have in common: "Java, Pascal/Delphi, Python 2.6, Python 3.1, Visual Basic 6, and VB.Net 2008".

That's right, managed code. Or a comparable facsimile thereof.

That's right, boys and girls. Forget about wasting time learning such useless concepts as proper memory management, or such useless fundamental concepts as the heap, the stack, etc... Just slap together a bunch of code, and it'll run just fine. No sweat. Dumb things down, so that everyone can now be a soooper hacker!

If I was living in UK right now, I'll be celebrating right now. It's clear as day this will result in the schools will now start churning out masses of wide-eyed ignoramuses who will go forth and start churning out volumes of code which they won't really understand themselves. Perpetual job security for me, AFAIK.

Re:Maybe I'm missing something

[Opportunist]

So lie?

It's not like they expect you to tell the truth anyway. If you're confident that your other experience gives you enough to handle the assignment, just lie in your application.

Of course, this can backfire if they REALLY do need the special knowledge. I remember we were looking for someone with an "extensive background in IA32 Assembler". The average applicant had years of programming background and maybe toyed with some ASM for Arm or PIC in his spare time. Unfortunately, we didn't need people who know how to program and "have seen an assembler (of a different CPU) once or twice", but people who sleep with the Intel CPU whitepaper under their pillow (preferably bundled with a copy of the undocumented features of the Windows executable loader).

In short, it can be really frustrating if you're one of the few "rare cases"...