🚀 go-pugleaf

raj@phys.ksu.edu (S. Raj Chaudhury) writes:
> I just got riled by the C/C++ remark because I have been trying to direct
> a student who wishes to pursue a MM major and really don't
> think C/C++ is *necessary* - though clearly programming at some level is...

  I'm not sure you can say that any language is particularly *necessary* 
theoretically, if you can program, you can program... C++, however, is a good
place to *implement* the OO paradigm, which *should* be fundamental to the
way we view MM - ie: Object-Oriented... There are folk-tales of the non-
programmers who have been directly introduced to the OO paradigm, told it
was the 'newest', and they promptly replied 'you mean you *haven't* been 
doing it this way all the time?  It seems to make the most sense' -- OO
fits MM in much the same way... it 'makes sense' - if we're searching for
the tools to approach information electronically the way we do in the noggin',
then we ought (IMHO) to begin that search in the OO world... granted, there
are *several* OO languages you could learn, but I'd say C++ (here again 
ignoring the presence of C in the original post) has the portability 
advantage... distributed MM is the direction a lot of us MM developers is a-
goin' ... ergo, portability is good... 

And another thing <grin> ... it seems that people *might* be interpreting this
MM degree thing as a degree in putting together MM presentations... (that may
very well be wrong... you may all see it as something more, and i may just
be blind to interpretations... it's happened before <grin>)  ... I submit
that this is akin to reducing CS to a degree in programming... which it 
clearly is not... An MM degree should, as many have pointed out, go beyond
the 'skill' courses involved in actually bringing the media together (although
it should most certainly contain those...) to encompass theory courses in 
many disciplines... consider learning & cognition, take history courses just
to get an idea of where we've been, take education courses to get an idea
of how the teaching thing works... take the media theory courses to learn
how the media shape our perceptions of the information they transmit... read
McLuhan but don't take everything he says as the word of <#include Deity.h>
and pay attention to the media as implemented currently... you'll get a lot of
good ideas...

- t.
-- 
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 Tripp Lilley   -- tlilley@csugrad.cs.vt.edu                         | |\/| |
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