🚀 go-pugleaf

iNasser says:

">I could have asked a similar question on any of the comp.lang
>newsgroups. I must say I was not surprised by the responses -
>things were pretty much as I expected. I would also include the
>following as another reason why a person would choose NOT to
>learn a particular language.
>
>        5) Can't get a job programming in that language."

This is truly short sighted. First of all, who knows what jobs will be
available four years from now, perhaps we will all be programming in 
Java. If you are worried about a job, the critical thing is to learn
basic competence in fundamental programming concepts. Yes, you should
know several languages, including by all means C++, but that does not
say that the first language you are taught should be the best guess of
what offers the most jobs this year!

If students knew what they needed to learn, then they would be professors
instead of teachers. Quite naturally students have a very limited viuew of
what might be useful, and I think anyone who has had a good education can
look back and realize that courses that you thought would be useful turn
out to be useless, and, particularly, vice versa. 

I personally would never hire anyone who knew only one programming language,
it is a sure sign of someone who has had heir thinking too warped by a
particular set of conventions. There was someone at one big commercial
company who was programming in COBOL 66 once, when the rest of the company
had switched to COBOL 74. He had argued successfully in court that his
employment contract specifically mentioned COBOL 66, and it was unfair
to make him switch. That is *not* the kind of programmer we want to hire,
and it is not what schools should be producing.

The one and only criterion for choosing a language for teaching CS1 and
CS2 is a pedagogical one, what language will best serve as a vehicle for
teaching fundamental concepts of programming, computer science, and
software engineering (a difficult combination to cover, but that's what
we attempt in a good CS1/CS2 course). 

If you have chosen a good language as a teaching vehicle, and have taught
it well to competent students, then they will have no trouble learning
other languages as they need to, including languages in the future that
have not been invented yet.