🚀 go-pugleaf

jmartin@cs.ucla.edu (Jay Martin) writes:

>What language is used for first class is not as important as 
>which languages are used in the core classes and which languages
>are used in research.  If you take your list and sort by 
>the top 40 US CS departments, you get:

I disagree. The basic fundamentals formed in an introductory course 
affect the student's view of computing for all courses afterwards.

And doesn't the rest of the world count? Here in sunny (though not so 
at the moment) Australia, things are quite different. I find your 
American bias thoroughly unnacceptable.

>Look mom no Ada and little Modula*!

Your potted listing had little validity.

>First, Pascal is a ancient joke, you can't really do anything real in
>it today and in my opinion those schools that teach it are too
>bleeping lazy to change CS1 to a practical language.  (My
>undergraduate institution UCI said they were going to convert to Ada,
>that was 10+ years ago) Pascal's antiquated design makes wonderful
>fodder for C programmers to ridicule pascal style languages ({} vs
>begin/end, etc).  Its a temporary language which quickly gets switched
>to the real "core" language.  This is most likely to be C/C++.

Practicality is not the measure by which you should judge a teaching 
language. However, I agree that Pascal's design is somewhat antiquated. 
This does not diminish it's value as a teaching language, at least 
initially. And the switch from Pascal to Modula-2 etc. is easily 
accomplished, when necessary. The same can not always be said for C, or 
for C++.

What possible basis can you have for such ridiculous statements? 
Especially when they directly contradict your "evidence"? Perhaps you 
should spend less time posting to Usenet, and more learning how to form a 
coherent argument!

>Scheme is also a theoretic joke.  Its for those computer scientists
>who think programming is non-scientific vomit and want to shoe-horn
>all the pathetic programming "CONCEPTS OF COMPUTER SCIENCE" into a
>single quarter so they won't have to teach it very often.  (They don't
>care that they have 4-5 years to teach programming/software
>engineering...).  Thus, Scheme is also a temporary concepts language
>(which like Pascal through its worthlessness promotes the conversion
>of students into C biggots).  Depts like Berkeley and UCLA quickly
>switch to C in the second class (CS2) and basically use C for the
>rest of the way (UCLA has now killed Scheme for the first class and
>teaches only C++).

Again, I could not disagree more. Scheme embodies the mathematical 
underpinnings of programming, and challenges many fundamental design 
assumptions in modern programming languages. Please read "Scheme And The 
Art Of Programming" from MIT Press (one of the top CS institutions in the 
world), and see whether you still feel this way.

>So basically for most universities in the above list, you can just change
>Pascal => Pascal/C and Scheme => Scheme/C.   C is thus around 100%.

Not really. Your argument is illogical at best.

>From what I have seen in research, Unix/C/C++ almost completely
>dominatates most software oriented parts of computer science like
>operating systems, etc.

Yes, C is an excellent systems programming language. UNIX is also quite 
nice. However, I am not foolish enough to think there is one true 
language which is perfect for every task I may wish to accomplish with 
it. Nor am I foolish enough to believe that the field of play won't 
suddenly change, forcing a total rethink of your philosophy. 

The fundamentals of Computer Science bear more importance than 
comparitively minor issues like which language we use for the time being. 
Languages come and go, as do Operating Systems. The Church-Turing thesis, 
on the other hand, is liable to be with us for a long time yet.

Mark