[plug] MS Curriculum at schools and TAFEs ...

[The Thought Assassin]

On Mon, 23 Apr 2001, Peter Wright wrote:
> Out of interest, what languages does UWA "teach" besides Java these days?

Haskell, C++, C, Prolog, Matlab, VB, Excel, bit-of-assembly-IIRC.
Maybe some others, but I'm not certain.

> From Ari's post, sounds like they still do Gofer in first year,

Thankfully not. :) We are using Haskell these days.
Roughly: Haskell-is-to-Gofer-as-C-is-to-Pascal.
Even the group that made Gofer has switched to writing "HUGS"="Haskell
User's Gofer System" these days.

> but then Java alone from then on.

Nope.

> I spoke to a friend of mine who graduated from UWA computer science last
> year and she made a comment to the effect that Java is God and... "if
> you want to know C/C++, you have to teach it to yourself."

I believe C++ is taught at the end of the Java OOP course, it certainly
was a couple of years ago. There are definitely some 3rd and 4th year
units that in C.

C++ is certainly on its way out because it is too platform-dependent in
many ways (though this is caused in no small part by VC++) and does not
provide clean enough OO support. C, on the other hand will be with us for
a long time, because it was written to suit a purpose, not an agenda.

> > The question is whether that is because the hype was right, or because
> > the hype was convincing. My opinion is that we so desperately needed to
> > get rid of the horrors of C++
> Ooooh, can we have a language war now? *bounces* Can we canwecanwe???

Don't get me started... :)

> > that the first half-way decent replacement that garnered enough hype was
> > destined to become the next big language.
> I think we need to hype Python a bit more then. :)

<WAR TYPE=LANGUAGE>
If we _must_ stay imperative, would could do a lot worse than Python.
</WAR>

-Greg Mildenhall