On Fri, Dec 27, 2002 at 11:39:03AM -0500, Uri Guttman wrote: > there are many factors into what languages are taught. corporate > sponsorship is one (evil) influence. perl has no corporate backing and > no PR engine so it doesn't get into the professors' radar.
That's a red herring. When I started as an undergrad, the language of instruction was Pascal. Before I graduated, the professors had dropped Pascal in favor of C. Neither language had a PR engine, nor did they have corporate sponsorship. In fact, students had to buy their own compilers in order to do their assignments. (Eventually, we got a handful of SPARC workstations and servers with a bundled C compiler.) By the late 80s, it was easy to find Pascal compilers for personal computers, and there were a decent number of textbooks at all levels of instruction that used Pascal. Students could also find a job based on their Pascal skills. By the early 90s, Pascal had fallen out of favor; a comparable set of textbooks used C, and all of the newer, more interesting texts used C. No one was interested in hiring Pascal programmers, but C programmers were almost assured of a job. brian listed the reason why Perl isn't the primary language of instruction: Perl hides the formalisms that a CS program is supposed to teach. Other reasons are the lack of textbooks for the standard CS classes that use Perl, and the higher demand for Java in the workplace compared to Perl. Believe it or not, mundane issues like CS theory and preparing students with the skills that will land them a job often take precedence over "my language is better" arguments at many universities. Z.
