When I stand on a flat plain, there is this slightly curved thing in the distance where the land ends and the sky begins, I believe that 'roundists' call it a 'horizon'.
The fact that the horizon is a certain distance away on flat ground allowed ancient philosophers and scientists to say the Earth was a sphere and what the size of that sphere was, roughly.
Anyway, on a flat earth the quickest route between Australia and South America is over the North Pole (as the North Pole is the centre of the flat earth for no good reason). Yet planes can fly between those countries far far quicker by going over the Pacific Ocean (which is large on a spherical Earth, but on a flat earth it's incredibly vast).
If there are people who seriously believe the Earth is flat still, then I despair.
How many years did it take for standard DVD to even start registering en-masse? Introduction 1997. I bought my first one in 2002 because the players hit £100. So that's 5 years, and I wasn't late to the game. Maybe 4 years if you count the PS2 when that was released.
BluRay isn't even 3 years old yet, and has had a faster uptake than DVD so far. People will get HDTVs when they upgrade anyway, and they'll end up with BluRay players when they upgrade the player too.
There's nothing interesting here. BluRay is here, it will drop in price like DVD did. Players will be $200, then $150, then $99. One thing that would improve uptake would be dropping the price of BluRay content however, it is massively overpriced.
Given that Java is now GPL and open-source, and lots of the popular third-party Java frameworks are also open-source, I would expect that open-source is really hot in many businesses - just that they don't know it.
When your developers code an interface to XYZ in a short time, it's not because they're reimplementing the wheel. No, they're using Axis. Or HttpClient. With hibernate, spring, struts, tiles, and so on.
But if we look at databases, you'll see a large investment in proprietary systems still, for core business data, with MySQL running minor functionality around the outside. Cutbacks simply mean that upgrading your database platform won't happen, it's already paid for, why migrate from Oracle to Postgresql!
The other big platform is MS proprietary. You all know the story. It keeps TheDailyWTF alive.
If software patents had the same limitations as pharma patents, this patent could have to pretty much provide the database schema and pseudo-code for managing that database.
Sadly software patents these days appear to be more about patenting concepts rather than concrete implementations. Until the rules are tightened up, these patent problems are just going to keep on popping up, as they have been already for many years.
The main point of a database is to store information. Therefore patenting "Common everyday collection of data, IN A DATABASE" is bloody pointless. Other software patent favourites include: ON THE INTERNET. OVER A WIRELESS CONNECTION. ON A COMPUTER even. All patents that couple common obvious or everyday activities and concepts with one of the above should be deleted. What other ones can you come up with?
Otherwise you'll surf the web all day after getting up at 1pm and watching Daytime TV for a few hours.
Two people will motivate each other. Three people might even get the time to do other business essential things, like the accounts! Also nicer for pub lunches, two people is a bit one-on-one.
More than three and I think that you start getting communications issues, unless you are all working on very different projects rather than the same codebase. Once you're in the meeting room, with the projector, and the Wii, you'll end up playing Mario Kart, which kills productivity. Also there's enough people to not have the focus on your own work, so you'll surf the web unless you're self-motivated enough or have a deadline.
1 = tag 1 (byte) 8 = length of string (int) 2 = tag 2 (byte) 16 = length of string (int) total size = 34 bytes
Of course, a TCP packet can hold a lot more than that anyway, so it's a poor example of saving bandwidth. The speed supposedly comes from creation and parsing of these things compared to even optimised XML.
Yeah, I came to the same conclusion as you. Poor article, but a brief glance at the tutorials on the Google site show what each thing is.
Anyone here that's written a binary network protocol (or binary file format) will have come across the same issues at some point. Variable length fields (strings, arrays of primitive types) need lengths first, and you need to tag what data is what if you have optional fields or repeated fields.
Parsing is easy - O(n) once through the binary data. Of course you can do the same with an XML string if you want a speedy parser. Google's just replaced a string tag with a numeric tag.
So it's nothing special. But it's nice they've done it. It won't replace SOAP or REST or XML of course.
My first job after college was coding SNMP MIBs for DiffServ within FreeBSD.
ASN.1 wasn't all that bad really. And of course we used code generators that did all the ASN.1 stuff. But it was quite readable, and seemed very powerful.
Looking at the ProtoBuf documentation (lightly) it looks like stuff that any lazy programmer has implemented to make their life easier. For instance I have written code that will take a description file* (like a.proto file) and generate (a) the Java class file, (b) the SQL schema, and (c) the DAO code in-between. It did the camel-case conversion just like this.proto thing, etc. I'm sure the Google thing is far more polished and proven, of course, but hey...
Adding on custom binary serialisation probably wouldn't take that long, although if I was to do it I would probably mimic ProtoBuf 'cos why reinvent the wheel (Google, take note). On the other hand, generating XML from an object is as simple as appending to a StringBuilder with some utility methods to do tags and attributes, and SAXParsers aren't the most inefficient things either.
However it clearly solves a problem for Google, and it looks simple to use.
(* well, actually I used Java 5 annotations on a barebones class object rather than having to parse a text file)
That's the one major advantage with BluRay, even if you use it with an old TV. The blocky artefacts are a lot smaller due to the higher resolution - never mind the H.264 and 30mbps+ video rate.
I merely have a 42" plasma TV and a PS3, and the one BluRay I've watched (Planet Earth, which is 1080i) is extremely clear and beautiful compared to a DVD. But the difference in quality is far less than the leap from VHS to DVD IMO, but I never had a videophile VHS deck.
As far as I'm concerned, HD resolutions have merely allowed TVs to get larger without having huge pixels in your face, and even then for most content you'd need a >50" TV before you really got annoyed with it.
Right. It clearly isn't using the Pentium design, but a Pentium-like design.
To that, they will have added SMT, because (a) in-order designs adapt to SMT well because they have a lot of pipeline bubbles and (b) there will be a lot of latency in the memory system and SMT helps hide that. I would assume 4 way SMT, but maybe 8. Larrabee will therefore support 128 or 256 hardware threads. nVidia's GT280 supports 768.
The closest chip I can think of right now is Sun's Niagara and Niagara 2 processors, except with a really beefy SIMD unit on each core, and a large number of cores on the die because of 45nm. I think Niagara 3 is going to be a 16 core device with 8 threads/core, can anyone confirm?
Note that this is pretty much what Sony wanted with Cell, but Cell was 2 process shrinks too early. 45nm PowerXCell32 will have 32 SPUs and 2 PPUs (whereas Larrabee looks like it is matching an equivalent of a weak-PPU with each SPU equivalent). It could run at 5GHz too... power/cooling notwithstanding.
And with the nVidia or ATI/AMD option, you can get it now.
Not "late 2009 or maybe 2010" like Larrabee.
Both companies current cards do 1 TFLOP or more in single precision mode. By 2010 they'll have doubled that.
In addition, assuming it will run at 2GHz is another massive leap. A single silverthorne core consumes a couple of watts at 1.6GHz and doesn't have a 512 bit SIMD unit attached to it that may or may not run at that speed either, whilst consuming quite a bit of power too.
Intel might get ahead if they can run graphics on X cores and physics on Y cores and other GPGPU on Z cores at the same time - I believe that both AMD and nVidia's designs have context switching issues in this regards right now. Both also have dedicated extra hardware for graphics support, so I presume Intel have that extra non-generic functionality as well...
Oh, and regarding graphics, does anyone here trust Intel's driver team to come up with working drivers for a new architecture straight away? It usually takes them a year after hardware release. Don't hold your breath.
Say "Yay" for SOAP sadly. I haven't used Axis 2, only Axis 1.0 and 1.4 though, but the generated files do have quite a bit of syntactic bloat to them. Shame that the Axis code generator hasn't learned of auto-generating imports either.
People, just use REST, okay? In Java you just include HTTP Client, and it's a few lines of code, assuming you have Java->XML and XML->Java code written already (efficient StringBuilders and SAXParsers respectfully, rather than lots of Introspection within the SOAP/Axis libraries). Yeah, it takes longer, but you run a timer against the same thing implemented as REST versus SOAP.
Sadly, when you're told to write an interface to a third-party web service, you have no choice, and you have one day to do it in, so the wsdl2java + utility class to map values to/from your data structure is a really quick and reliable way to do things.
And what do you do if, say, GE is convicted of murder and 300,000 people no longer have jobs? All share trading is suspended before the court case. If found guilty, share trading is suspended until the completion of the sentence. All profits from the running of the company are given to the victims over the duration of the sentence. If there are no profits or the company is running at a loss, the company is closed down. All responsible members of the company cannot leave the company until the sentence is completed.
So, Ford could get 10 years for not recalling a car that they knew had a fault, etc.
1) The shareholders are punished, not just the corporate entity. 2) The employees don't lose their jobs. 3) The victims get compensation. 4) The punishment has an end, and things can go on afterwards.
This is my "Corporate Conviction Manifesto, version 0.1" and it's released under a Creative Commons license for you to all pick apart with flaws and issues and loopholes... so you fix them, become politicians, and enact them.
If the problem is inherently slow, then the speed of the language really isn't the issue. Most of the time will be spent waiting on network I/O or similar. In this case it's better to have more understandable code and a more verbose network protocol (e.g., using XML) than it is to optimise such a process away.
For the vast number of places that Java is actually programmed, it is a very good choice of language because (a) it's well known, (b) it has loads of third party libraries, and (c) it performs good enough, threading is easy so you can just add cores to your solution, and so on.
These are probably the same people that think that Java + Struts/Spring/Hibernate is hard and slow, and then try and reinvent the wheel in PHP.
It also happened in the latest release of Firefox 2... damned if you do, damned if you don't. I think GMail altered their Javascript because it stopped happening after a week. This was on Windows as well, so the window would remain, unresponsive, and took several attempts with the "End Program" dialog to even kill it.
Virgin DSL is worthless, it's terrible, and anyone who does more than zero investigation into their potential DSL provider will find this out. It has just struck me that this comment has an altogether different meaning, yet is still true.
Virgin DSL is worthless, it's terrible, and anyone who does more than zero investigation into their potential DSL provider will find this out.
Virgin Cable on the other hand seems quite happy to give you 1MBps at peak hours, although presumably this isn't true in all areas of the country.
I don't want my iPlayer viewing (on my Wii, it's not great quality but it's good enough, watched yesterday's Dr Who earlier tonight) crappified because the BBC rightfully say that it's the ISPs lying to their customers about capacity that is the problem. On the other hand, I understand that capacity is oversold otherwise it would be £250 per month. I can understand rate limiting users who just bittorrent during peak times so that other people don't have nothing, that is only fair. I also know that networks can have DiffServ or a modern variant thereof, to provide quality tiers. These should be paid for by the user.
In 1998 I was an intern at BT over the summer, and we got in a bunch of ARM based Acorn set top boxes (never released in the end). They had 33MHz ARMs in them. And MPEG2 decoders.
I wrote a Tetris applet for the built-in web browser one week, instead of doing the work I was meant to be doing. Ah, Java 1.0.4 back in the day.
Back in the days, when we were young wee bairns, those bits of paper our elders bought stuff with were worth a lot more elsewhere in the world than they are now.
Cheap, small laptops in the next year or two will be very popular though. People will be cutting back. They're not going to buy something fancy, they'll get something that will do the job. As long as it does the full internet, does their email, has information manager functionality, they'll be happy.
It's not about CPU power in this form factor, unless you do something silly like running Vista on the device. The iPhone shows that you can have a slick, smooth interface, fully featured (um, cut and paste excepted) that works well for the user, on a mere 412MHz ARM11 CPU. I suspect that some tasks (music decoding) are offloaded to the ARM9 on another chip in the system that has acceleration for that. Oh, there's also an ARM7 in that other chip. Probably ARM7s in the wireless controller too. Intel - you really think you can compete when something like an iPhone has so many ARMs to slap you about with?
Oh, I digress for a bad joke. Anyway, it's about the software and its optimisation. Linux has a grand chance here to shine on the lesser hardware.
We started off with Functional Programming - ML to be precise. This was 12 years ago when I went to University.
The reason? As you wrote, lots of people had learned standard stuff before, and this would give a level playing field for the most part at the beginning.
After that it was Modula-3, which changed to Java the year after.
The C course was about all the places you could trip up in C, and pointers. It was assumed that you could learn it on your own otherwise.
There was also some Prolog.
Most of the courses were mathematically based, with a healthy dose of systems and OS stuff. The programming was a small overall portion.
I'd done Pascal at high school (UK 6th form - age 16 - 18).
Of course, I'd also learned BASIC and Z80 assembler way before then, even a bit of 68k:)
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When I stand on a flat plain, there is this slightly curved thing in the distance where the land ends and the sky begins, I believe that 'roundists' call it a 'horizon'.
The fact that the horizon is a certain distance away on flat ground allowed ancient philosophers and scientists to say the Earth was a sphere and what the size of that sphere was, roughly.
Anyway, on a flat earth the quickest route between Australia and South America is over the North Pole (as the North Pole is the centre of the flat earth for no good reason). Yet planes can fly between those countries far far quicker by going over the Pacific Ocean (which is large on a spherical Earth, but on a flat earth it's incredibly vast).
If there are people who seriously believe the Earth is flat still, then I despair.
How many years did it take for standard DVD to even start registering en-masse? Introduction 1997. I bought my first one in 2002 because the players hit £100. So that's 5 years, and I wasn't late to the game. Maybe 4 years if you count the PS2 when that was released.
BluRay isn't even 3 years old yet, and has had a faster uptake than DVD so far. People will get HDTVs when they upgrade anyway, and they'll end up with BluRay players when they upgrade the player too.
There's nothing interesting here. BluRay is here, it will drop in price like DVD did. Players will be $200, then $150, then $99. One thing that would improve uptake would be dropping the price of BluRay content however, it is massively overpriced.
Given that Java is now GPL and open-source, and lots of the popular third-party Java frameworks are also open-source, I would expect that open-source is really hot in many businesses - just that they don't know it.
When your developers code an interface to XYZ in a short time, it's not because they're reimplementing the wheel. No, they're using Axis. Or HttpClient. With hibernate, spring, struts, tiles, and so on.
But if we look at databases, you'll see a large investment in proprietary systems still, for core business data, with MySQL running minor functionality around the outside. Cutbacks simply mean that upgrading your database platform won't happen, it's already paid for, why migrate from Oracle to Postgresql!
The other big platform is MS proprietary. You all know the story. It keeps TheDailyWTF alive.
If software patents had the same limitations as pharma patents, this patent could have to pretty much provide the database schema and pseudo-code for managing that database.
Sadly software patents these days appear to be more about patenting concepts rather than concrete implementations. Until the rules are tightened up, these patent problems are just going to keep on popping up, as they have been already for many years.
The main point of a database is to store information. Therefore patenting "Common everyday collection of data, IN A DATABASE" is bloody pointless. Other software patent favourites include: ON THE INTERNET. OVER A WIRELESS CONNECTION. ON A COMPUTER even. All patents that couple common obvious or everyday activities and concepts with one of the above should be deleted. What other ones can you come up with?
PS: It's 2008, why the short comment title limit?
Only if you're some freaky self-motivated person.
Otherwise you'll surf the web all day after getting up at 1pm and watching Daytime TV for a few hours.
Two people will motivate each other. Three people might even get the time to do other business essential things, like the accounts! Also nicer for pub lunches, two people is a bit one-on-one.
More than three and I think that you start getting communications issues, unless you are all working on very different projects rather than the same codebase. Once you're in the meeting room, with the projector, and the Wii, you'll end up playing Mario Kart, which kills productivity. Also there's enough people to not have the focus on your own work, so you'll surf the web unless you're self-motivated enough or have a deadline.
How about the Elonex Onet+ then ...
It's Linux only because it runs on a 400MHz non-x86 CPU.
7" display. 2GB storage. SD. WiFi. 3 USB2 ports. VGA out. 3hr battery. 625g.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/07/09/elonex_unveils_second_scc/
That's the prototype description.
The binary would be like:
18John Doe216jdoe@example.com
1 = tag 1 (byte)
8 = length of string (int)
2 = tag 2 (byte)
16 = length of string (int)
total size = 34 bytes
Of course, a TCP packet can hold a lot more than that anyway, so it's a poor example of saving bandwidth. The speed supposedly comes from creation and parsing of these things compared to even optimised XML.
Yeah, I came to the same conclusion as you. Poor article, but a brief glance at the tutorials on the Google site show what each thing is.
Anyone here that's written a binary network protocol (or binary file format) will have come across the same issues at some point. Variable length fields (strings, arrays of primitive types) need lengths first, and you need to tag what data is what if you have optional fields or repeated fields.
Parsing is easy - O(n) once through the binary data. Of course you can do the same with an XML string if you want a speedy parser. Google's just replaced a string tag with a numeric tag.
So it's nothing special. But it's nice they've done it. It won't replace SOAP or REST or XML of course.
My first job after college was coding SNMP MIBs for DiffServ within FreeBSD.
ASN.1 wasn't all that bad really. And of course we used code generators that did all the ASN.1 stuff. But it was quite readable, and seemed very powerful.
Looking at the ProtoBuf documentation (lightly) it looks like stuff that any lazy programmer has implemented to make their life easier. For instance I have written code that will take a description file* (like a .proto file) and generate (a) the Java class file, (b) the SQL schema, and (c) the DAO code in-between. It did the camel-case conversion just like this .proto thing, etc. I'm sure the Google thing is far more polished and proven, of course, but hey ...
Adding on custom binary serialisation probably wouldn't take that long, although if I was to do it I would probably mimic ProtoBuf 'cos why reinvent the wheel (Google, take note). On the other hand, generating XML from an object is as simple as appending to a StringBuilder with some utility methods to do tags and attributes, and SAXParsers aren't the most inefficient things either.
However it clearly solves a problem for Google, and it looks simple to use.
(* well, actually I used Java 5 annotations on a barebones class object rather than having to parse a text file)
That's the one major advantage with BluRay, even if you use it with an old TV. The blocky artefacts are a lot smaller due to the higher resolution - never mind the H.264 and 30mbps+ video rate.
I merely have a 42" plasma TV and a PS3, and the one BluRay I've watched (Planet Earth, which is 1080i) is extremely clear and beautiful compared to a DVD. But the difference in quality is far less than the leap from VHS to DVD IMO, but I never had a videophile VHS deck.
As far as I'm concerned, HD resolutions have merely allowed TVs to get larger without having huge pixels in your face, and even then for most content you'd need a >50" TV before you really got annoyed with it.
Right. It clearly isn't using the Pentium design, but a Pentium-like design.
To that, they will have added SMT, because (a) in-order designs adapt to SMT well because they have a lot of pipeline bubbles and (b) there will be a lot of latency in the memory system and SMT helps hide that. I would assume 4 way SMT, but maybe 8. Larrabee will therefore support 128 or 256 hardware threads. nVidia's GT280 supports 768.
The closest chip I can think of right now is Sun's Niagara and Niagara 2 processors, except with a really beefy SIMD unit on each core, and a large number of cores on the die because of 45nm. I think Niagara 3 is going to be a 16 core device with 8 threads/core, can anyone confirm?
Note that this is pretty much what Sony wanted with Cell, but Cell was 2 process shrinks too early. 45nm PowerXCell32 will have 32 SPUs and 2 PPUs (whereas Larrabee looks like it is matching an equivalent of a weak-PPU with each SPU equivalent). It could run at 5GHz too... power/cooling notwithstanding.
And with the nVidia or ATI/AMD option, you can get it now.
Not "late 2009 or maybe 2010" like Larrabee.
Both companies current cards do 1 TFLOP or more in single precision mode. By 2010 they'll have doubled that.
In addition, assuming it will run at 2GHz is another massive leap. A single silverthorne core consumes a couple of watts at 1.6GHz and doesn't have a 512 bit SIMD unit attached to it that may or may not run at that speed either, whilst consuming quite a bit of power too.
Intel might get ahead if they can run graphics on X cores and physics on Y cores and other GPGPU on Z cores at the same time - I believe that both AMD and nVidia's designs have context switching issues in this regards right now. Both also have dedicated extra hardware for graphics support, so I presume Intel have that extra non-generic functionality as well...
Oh, and regarding graphics, does anyone here trust Intel's driver team to come up with working drivers for a new architecture straight away? It usually takes them a year after hardware release. Don't hold your breath.
Say "Yay" for SOAP sadly. I haven't used Axis 2, only Axis 1.0 and 1.4 though, but the generated files do have quite a bit of syntactic bloat to them. Shame that the Axis code generator hasn't learned of auto-generating imports either.
People, just use REST, okay? In Java you just include HTTP Client, and it's a few lines of code, assuming you have Java->XML and XML->Java code written already (efficient StringBuilders and SAXParsers respectfully, rather than lots of Introspection within the SOAP/Axis libraries). Yeah, it takes longer, but you run a timer against the same thing implemented as REST versus SOAP.
Sadly, when you're told to write an interface to a third-party web service, you have no choice, and you have one day to do it in, so the wsdl2java + utility class to map values to/from your data structure is a really quick and reliable way to do things.
If found guilty, share trading is suspended until the completion of the sentence.
All profits from the running of the company are given to the victims over the duration of the sentence. If there are no profits or the company is running at a loss, the company is closed down.
All responsible members of the company cannot leave the company until the sentence is completed.
So, Ford could get 10 years for not recalling a car that they knew had a fault, etc.
1) The shareholders are punished, not just the corporate entity.
2) The employees don't lose their jobs.
3) The victims get compensation.
4) The punishment has an end, and things can go on afterwards.
This is my "Corporate Conviction Manifesto, version 0.1" and it's released under a Creative Commons license for you to all pick apart with flaws and issues and loopholes
If the problem is inherently slow, then the speed of the language really isn't the issue. Most of the time will be spent waiting on network I/O or similar. In this case it's better to have more understandable code and a more verbose network protocol (e.g., using XML) than it is to optimise such a process away.
For the vast number of places that Java is actually programmed, it is a very good choice of language because (a) it's well known, (b) it has loads of third party libraries, and (c) it performs good enough, threading is easy so you can just add cores to your solution, and so on.
These are probably the same people that think that Java + Struts/Spring/Hibernate is hard and slow, and then try and reinvent the wheel in PHP.
It also happened in the latest release of Firefox 2 ... damned if you do, damned if you don't. I think GMail altered their Javascript because it stopped happening after a week. This was on Windows as well, so the window would remain, unresponsive, and took several attempts with the "End Program" dialog to even kill it.
My Ubuntu won't run Flash.
The new website runs great. It loads quickly, and whilst it looks a bit odd, I see the comics without a problem, and they're in colour every day.
Basically, the new website probably looks great on an iPhone.
Virgin DSL is worthless, it's terrible, and anyone who does more than zero investigation into their potential DSL provider will find this out.
Virgin Cable on the other hand seems quite happy to give you 1MBps at peak hours, although presumably this isn't true in all areas of the country.
I don't want my iPlayer viewing (on my Wii, it's not great quality but it's good enough, watched yesterday's Dr Who earlier tonight) crappified because the BBC rightfully say that it's the ISPs lying to their customers about capacity that is the problem. On the other hand, I understand that capacity is oversold otherwise it would be £250 per month. I can understand rate limiting users who just bittorrent during peak times so that other people don't have nothing, that is only fair. I also know that networks can have DiffServ or a modern variant thereof, to provide quality tiers. These should be paid for by the user.
In 1998 I was an intern at BT over the summer, and we got in a bunch of ARM based Acorn set top boxes (never released in the end). They had 33MHz ARMs in them. And MPEG2 decoders.
I wrote a Tetris applet for the built-in web browser one week, instead of doing the work I was meant to be doing. Ah, Java 1.0.4 back in the day.
Back in the days, when we were young wee bairns, those bits of paper our elders bought stuff with were worth a lot more elsewhere in the world than they are now.
Cheap, small laptops in the next year or two will be very popular though. People will be cutting back. They're not going to buy something fancy, they'll get something that will do the job. As long as it does the full internet, does their email, has information manager functionality, they'll be happy.
It's not about CPU power in this form factor, unless you do something silly like running Vista on the device. The iPhone shows that you can have a slick, smooth interface, fully featured (um, cut and paste excepted) that works well for the user, on a mere 412MHz ARM11 CPU. I suspect that some tasks (music decoding) are offloaded to the ARM9 on another chip in the system that has acceleration for that. Oh, there's also an ARM7 in that other chip. Probably ARM7s in the wireless controller too. Intel - you really think you can compete when something like an iPhone has so many ARMs to slap you about with?
Oh, I digress for a bad joke. Anyway, it's about the software and its optimisation. Linux has a grand chance here to shine on the lesser hardware.
Didn't all the Windows alphas and betas and release candidates have expiration dates?
Was this v2.0 firmware intended for use on the iPhone / iPod Touch itself, or was it intended for use within the iPhone Emulator software?
Otherwise, yeah, beta software has flaws, that's why it is beta.
And there's a fixed version available. What a big wailing and angst about nothing. Whhhaaaaa whaaaaaaa, I'm a Baby!
I read the article earlier, and then it had that the star was 5 light years away. I investigated, and it is actually 4900 light years away.
I'm impressed that they could resolve two planets going around a star that far away, gravitational lensing or not.
We started off with Functional Programming - ML to be precise. This was 12 years ago when I went to University.
:)
The reason? As you wrote, lots of people had learned standard stuff before, and this would give a level playing field for the most part at the beginning.
After that it was Modula-3, which changed to Java the year after.
The C course was about all the places you could trip up in C, and pointers. It was assumed that you could learn it on your own otherwise.
There was also some Prolog.
Most of the courses were mathematically based, with a healthy dose of systems and OS stuff. The programming was a small overall portion.
I'd done Pascal at high school (UK 6th form - age 16 - 18).
Of course, I'd also learned BASIC and Z80 assembler way before then, even a bit of 68k