🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2633@cbnewsc.ATT.COM>, nevin1@cbnewsc.ATT.COM (nevin.j.liber) writes:
> In article <1501@shuksan.UUCP> scott@shuksan.UUCP (Scott Moody) writes:
> >Remember that the first language you are taught in CS101 is also the 
> >main language you use throughout undergraduate education (outside of
> >the many languages course).
> 
> This bothers me.  Why should the first language you learn be your
> primary language throughout college?  Doesn't sound like a well-rounded
> CS education to me!  By using different languages, one learns different
> ways of thinking about their programming problems.  [ ... ]

 The Whorf hypothesis for natural languages seems to work for artificial
symbol systems as well (don't linguists deny that programming languages
are really languages?).

> >There are a lot of jobs in industry
> >that need Ada programmers and it is still the job of the Universites
> >to teach/prepare its students for the real-world.
> 
> There are also a lot of jobs in industry that need C programmers, C++
> programmers, assembly language programmers, etc.   Should universities
> ignore this?  [ ... ]
> -- 
> NEVIN ":-)" LIBER  AT&T Bell Laboratories  nevin1@ihlpb.ATT.COM  (312) 979-4751

 Universities should not ignore the "real world", just refuse to be corrupted
by it!  I just want to point out that this is not an absolute dichotomy
between the "intellectually pure" and the "applied".

 All one needs to do is to find a "neat" language which is somewhat like
a practical, widely used language.  The introductory language can be the neat
language, then application courses can use the second choice, with some brief
teaching of methods to simulate the "neat" stuff in the grubby language.

 Scheme, as used at MIT, fits the bill as a "neat" language, but it is too
far from widely-used languages (MIT graduates are smart enough to make the
transition themselves, but not all college grads have the time or initiative
to do this).

 Here is a possible pair of languages:  use Eiffel for introductory courses,
because it is designed to be object-oriented and "neat" from the ground up.
Eiffel probably won't be widely used for applications (for political reasons),
so I suggest C++ as the "practical" language.  

 C++ is a reasonable compromise to an object oriented language. I do not wish to
disparage Bjarne Stroustrup: the hangups in C++ are due to the fact that it
is tied to C (if it weren't an evolutionary path from C, nobody would be using
it).

 Can anybody else suggest other language pairs of this sort?
-- 
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