On Fri, Aug 11, 2000 at 12:16:19PM -0500, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote:
> Adam Turoff [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] quoth:
> *>I'll also mention that Java is the language of instruction at many
> *>universities, and college students account for a decent number of
> *>book purchases. And those same college students aren't using the
> *>Java online documentation, and they're buying multiple Java books per
> *>year, possibly the same ones on the shelf at B&N.
>
> If this were true, Scheme books would be topping the charts for the last
> 10 or so years.
You obviously haven't seen many CS curricula. Scheme is certainly not
the most common language of instruction. Neither was Lisp before that.
Follow the money and what do you find? A lot of 4-year institutions
in the US trying to attract 18 year olds who want to Make Money
Fast (tm) when they drop out or graduate. For that they want a
curriculum in the mainstream languages, tools, and software
that are used in the industry at large. Today, that means Java, Java,
C and Java. Maybe a little bit of UML or SQL on top.
Does this describe curricula at Rice, MIT, or UofP? No.
Is it common in more mainstream, more pragmatic, less academically
focused curricula? Yes.
Wouldn't we all be better off if we all started with SICP? Probably.
Z.
