I have to disagree with this. First, I would try to guess the reasoning of this decision. Compared to C or C++, Java is a much better language to be used for introductory classes. Based on my personal experience, using C or C++ involves dealing with a lot of overheads. For those students new to Computer Science, these may discourage them into delving more deeply into the field. Another aspect that may also be a factor in the decision is the growing popularity of Java, in comparison with, say, Smalltalk. OK, maybe Smalltalk is more object-oriented, but the decision makers at College Board certainly cannot ignore market force.
As a concluding remark, let me comment on the suspected money transfer from Sun. Here at Columbia we use Java for our main introductory class, and I don't think the decision was made with the help of money transfer from Sun to the CS department. Sometimes, it's not just about money, but also because the thing--Java in this case--is indeed better for the purpose.
Let me add to this posting. I was in the same class, but I took it last year when it was first offered in this style (Columbia used to use Nachos for the OS class). As was said, we used Linux in virtual machines (VMware). The VMware itself runs on Linux. One good thing about this is more than one groups can use the same machine; you just have to create VMware disk for each group. There is an article about the class at DDJ. I found this approach very good, because you don't crash machines when something goes wrong in the kernel. You just crash the VMs, and this won't affect other people doing other unrelated things on the machines running the VMs (good utilization of resources).
This can be an opportunity for open-source. Why wait for Sun to release the JDK for your favorite platform? Try writing your own implementation and open-source it. And you don't have to write everything from scratch. IBM has made Jikes open, and it is a very good compiler. Of course, you have to also provide the set of library classes. But that's not impossible. Just look at what Blackdown has done. Too bad right now it's only for Linux. I want to see the latest JDK (or clones) released for more platforms (such as the BSD variants).
The bad thing is, even though we/.-ers know that his article is totally baseless, the general public who read the article may not. We have to force ABCNews to post some corrections (plus maybe the link to Greenbaum's response), because the article is obviously violating journalistic integrity. In addition, it will be better to have the major news sites like CNet or ZDNN to cover this. The more publicity we get about this, the better so that more of the general public know that Moody's argument is wrong.
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I have to disagree with this. First, I would try to guess the reasoning of this decision. Compared to C or C++, Java is a much better language to be used for introductory classes. Based on my personal experience, using C or C++ involves dealing with a lot of overheads. For those students new to Computer Science, these may discourage them into delving more deeply into the field. Another aspect that may also be a factor in the decision is the growing popularity of Java, in comparison with, say, Smalltalk. OK, maybe Smalltalk is more object-oriented, but the decision makers at College Board certainly cannot ignore market force.
As a concluding remark, let me comment on the suspected money transfer from Sun. Here at Columbia we use Java for our main introductory class, and I don't think the decision was made with the help of money transfer from Sun to the CS department. Sometimes, it's not just about money, but also because the thing--Java in this case--is indeed better for the purpose.
Let me add to this posting. I was in the same class, but I took it last year when it was first offered in this style (Columbia used to use Nachos for the OS class). As was said, we used Linux in virtual machines (VMware). The VMware itself runs on Linux. One good thing about this is more than one groups can use the same machine; you just have to create VMware disk for each group. There is an article about the class at DDJ. I found this approach very good, because you don't crash machines when something goes wrong in the kernel. You just crash the VMs, and this won't affect other people doing other unrelated things on the machines running the VMs (good utilization of resources).
This can be an opportunity for open-source. Why wait for Sun to release the JDK for your favorite platform? Try writing your own implementation and open-source it. And you don't have to write everything from scratch. IBM has made Jikes open, and it is a very good compiler. Of course, you have to also provide the set of library classes. But that's not impossible. Just look at what Blackdown has done. Too bad right now it's only for Linux. I want to see the latest JDK (or clones) released for more platforms (such as the BSD variants).
First there was Fred Moody. Now comes Goodhew....
The bad thing is, even though we /.-ers know that his article is totally baseless, the general public who read the article may not. We have to force ABCNews to post some corrections (plus maybe the link to Greenbaum's response), because the article is obviously violating journalistic integrity. In addition, it will be better to have the major news sites like CNet or ZDNN to cover this. The more publicity we get about this, the better so that more of the general public know that Moody's argument is wrong.